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USE OF ECOLOGICAL RISK ASSESSMENT FOR DEVELOPING AND COORDINATING RESEARCH AT REGIONAL AND WATERSHED SCALES
Citation:
Cormier, S M., M SchubauerBerigan, B Subramanian, S. I. Gordon, M. Smith, AND S B. Norton. USE OF ECOLOGICAL RISK ASSESSMENT FOR DEVELOPING AND COORDINATING RESEARCH AT REGIONAL AND WATERSHED SCALES. Environmental Effects Monitoring Workshop, Quebec, Canada, October 21, 1998.
Description:
A series of studies were undertaken to develop quantitative methods that could be used for ecological risk assessments at a watershed scale. This work contributed to the newly published ecological risk assessment guidelines (USEPA, 1998) and focused attention on the need for a process that helps to organize complex applied ecological research efforts. This paper describes the use of the ecological risk assessment process to provide an organizational framework for conducting and coordinating complex research efforts among federal and state agencies, academia and private industry. Six studies that contributed to the Big Darby Creek Watershed ecological risk assessment are highlighted in this paper. Although an incomplete description of the entire assessment and research effort, the presented studies cover a wide range of topics from the ecological risk assessment process, encompassing watershed scale and regional analysis, relationships among land use and in-stream condition, diagnostic signatures from fish and benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages, and development of regional criteria for chemical exposure. The overall collaborative effort used the ecological risk assessment framework to organize, manage, and communicate a large, interdisciplinary study that involved scientists from federal and state governments, and academia. It provided a framework for describing the value and role of each separate study in a grander scheme and so provided the organizational basis for advancing applied ecological research beyond the individual scientific disciplines especially at regional and watershed scales.