SYNOPS is a risk indicator developed in Germany (Gutsche and Strassemeyer, 2007) to assess environmental risks.

Besides pesticide use data, SYNOPS also requires information on crop stage, application technique, soil type, location, topography of the field, etc.. Based on this information, SYNOPS calculates the Predicted Environmental Concentrations (PEC) for different compartments and compare the PEC values to the LC50 and NOEC values for the various target organisms and Exposure Toxicity Ratios (ETR) are calculated for each target organism. In contrast to PLI or EIQ, SYNOPS considers the effect of mitigation measures such as buffer zones or low drift spraying equipment because the concept is based on the calculation of PEC values. Originally, SYNOPS was developed to assess the environmental risks at farm or regional level but not at national level (Hernández-Hernández et al., 2007; Strassemeyer et al., 2018). SYNOPS-GIS is used to assess the filed specific risk indices for all agricultural fields within a certain region. These field specific risk indices are then aggregated on regional level to identify so called hot spots (Gutsche and Strassemeyer, 2010) or evaluated to analyse pesticide use strategies under regional environmental conditions (Strassemeyer and Golla, 2018). In a separate approach, SYNOPS-TREND calculates relative risk scores on national level, based on sales data and environmental scenarios. This approach is used as indicator to evaluate national risk trends within the NAP.