Nitrates (NO₃) and nitrites (NO₂) are naturally occurring forms of nitrogen that are essential for plant growth, which is why they are so heavily used in modern agriculture. However, when excessive nitrogen ends up in waterways, it becomes a public health and environmental problem.

Locus Technologies, a SaaS provider in the environmental space, surveyed its multitenant database and found 805,046 detected results out of over 3.7M sampling events of nitrates and nitrites readings across customers using its popular EIM software. It represents the most detected chemical in our database.