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USE OF MODELING APPROACHES TO UNDERSTAND POTENTIAL IMPACTS OF GENETICALLY MODIFIED PLANTS ON PLANT COMMUNITIES
Citation:
Colasanti, R., R. Hunt, AND L S. Watrud. USE OF MODELING APPROACHES TO UNDERSTAND POTENTIAL IMPACTS OF GENETICALLY MODIFIED PLANTS ON PLANT COMMUNITIES. Presented at EPA Workshop on developing EUPs for genetically modified pesticidal crops, Washington, DC, February 9-11, 2004.
Description:
Model development is of interest to ecologists, regulators and developers, since it may assist theoretical understanding, decision making in experimental design, product development and risk assessment. In order to predict the potential impacts of genetically modified (GM) plants, we must understand how the engineered traits are expressed in an ecological context. It would be a daunting task to experimentally evaluate the full multiplicity of potential pair-wise interactions between GM plants under a broad variety of actual environmental conditions. We propose therefore to model interactions between GM plants and the natural environment by describing the plants and the effect of the GM trait in terms of plant functional types. This approach takes the external factors which limit the amount of plant material present in any habitat and classifies them into two categories: (1) stress, defined with regard to the availability of nutrients and (2) disturbance, which refers to the destruction of plant material. The ecological characteristics of plants both natural and genetically modified, can be described based on functional type i.e., as determined by their quantifiable physiological relationships to stress and disturbance. By ascribing the large number of plant ecological characteristics to a smaller number of functional types the problem becomes tractable. The presentation will describe the model that is under development, and how it will be validated using data from field and mesocosm studies being carried out by researchers from WED.