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Scaling up from an individual to a population-level assessment for risks of pesticides to threatened and endangered birds
Citation:
Kanarek, A., M. Etterson, K. Garber, E. Odenkirchen, AND N. Schumaker. Scaling up from an individual to a population-level assessment for risks of pesticides to threatened and endangered birds. SETAC North America, Salt Lake City, UT, November 01 - 05, 2015.
Impact/Purpose:
not applicable
Description:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in collaboration with the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is currently developing a methodology to assess the risks of pesticides to federally-listed threatened and endangered species. In this poster, we present an integrated modeling approach that scales across ecological processes to capture mechanistic effects due to simulated pesticide exposure to listed birds. Through the use of toxicity translation tools, i.e., the Terrestrial Investigation Model (TIM) and MCnest (the Markov Chain Nest Productivity Model), we parameterize a spatially-explicit, stochastic, stage-structured population model with HexSim to explore probabilistically how impacts to individuals scale to affect population response and recovery. We illustrate this refined methodology with a specific case study and demonstrate a systematic approach to interpret standard toxicity data at the individual level in the context of survival and fecundity at the population level. This effort incorporates maps illustrating the spatial distribution of habitat, pesticides, and other quantities of interest in order to obtain a aggregated perspective on population viability across a heterogeneous landscape.