By Congressional mandate, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must determine whether individual chemicals, either new or existing, can be manufactured and sold in the United States. The evaluation process for each chemical includes an ecological risk assessment. To improve capabilities for assessing and predicting risk to ecosystems, EPA's Office of Research and Development initiated a comprehensive research program in 1986. The three levels of any risk assessment (exposure analysis, hazard analysis, and the integration of the two into a risk analysis) are addressed in research involving six levels of integration. In the report, the six individual projects--decision support systems, exposure analysis, toxicokinetics, biotic effects analysis, population and community risk assessment, and ecosystem risk analysis--are discussed and component publications are listed.

Caption title. At head of title: Environmental research brief. Shipping list no.: 88-552-P. "Aug. 1988." Includes bibliographical references (pages 2-5). "EPA/600-M-88-011."