Improved extraction and clean-up of imidazolinone herbicides from soil solutions using different solid-phase sorbents.

Extraction and quantification of herbicide residues from soil are important in understanding the behaviour of persistent herbicides. This research investigated extraction and clean-up methods for imidazolinone herbicides from soil and soil amended with organic material. A series of solvent mixes, pH conditions and sorbents was tested. Across three imidazolinone herbicides: imazapyr, imazethapyr and imazaquin, 0.5M NaOH extraction gave greater than 90% recovery from soil samples; however, 0.5M NaOH:MeOH (80:20) resulted in higher recovery for imazaquin, but not for the other two herbicides. Of the sorbents tested, the use of chromatographic mode sequencing using C(18) and SCX sorbents provided consistent high (>85%) recovery of all three herbicides from soil and separation of the herbicides from other soil components by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). These two methods will allow high recovery of these imidazolinone herbicides from soil and have the ability to detect these herbicides without interference from other soil components.