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The ECOTOXicology Knowledgebase: Curated ecologically-relevant toxicity data for risk assessments, criteria derivation, and environmental research.
Citation:
Olker, J., C. Elonen, C. Lalone, S. Erickson, M. Skopinski, A. Pilli, AND D. Hoff. The ECOTOXicology Knowledgebase: Curated ecologically-relevant toxicity data for risk assessments, criteria derivation, and environmental research. SETAC North America, Toronto, ON, CANADA, November 03 - 07, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
The ECOTOX Knowledgebase is a comprehensive, publicly available application providing chemical environmental toxicity data on aquatic life, terrestrial plants and wildlife compiled from over 48,000 references covering over 11,000 chemicals and over 12,000 species. ECOTOX data are used for all ecological risk assessments supporting pesticide registrations and re-registrations, all ambient water quality criteria for chemicals published since 1985, site-specific water quality criteria (by EPA Regions, States, and Tribes), and assessments used in emergency response. ECOTOX has established standard operating procedures that meet requirements for Agency systematic reviews of available information for use in Agency decision making. This presentation provides an overview of the ECOTOX pipeline and a demonstration of exploration and visualization tools to identify relevant available toxicity data. In addition, this presentation describes how recent updates to the ECOTOX user interface and interfacing with other databases provide improved support for environmental research and risk assessment.
Description:
The ECOTOXicology Knowledgebase (ECOTOX, http://www.epa.gov/ecotox/), is a comprehensive, curated database that summarizes toxicity data fromsingle-chemical exposure studies to aquatic life, terrestrial plants, and wildlife. For over 30 years, ECOTOX has provided ecologically-relevant toxicity data to meet the systematic review and data transparency needs of the U.S. EPA for risk assessments and regulatory decisions. Data are curated from relevant studies after processing through well-established protocols to exhaustively search the literature, review references for applicability and acceptability, and extract data for all study details, including species taxonomic hierarchy, chemical purity, routes of exposure, and all calculated or statistically derived endpoints provided by the authors. ECOTOX currently includes data for more than 11,000 chemicals from over 48,000 references, with additional data uploaded quarterly. To meet the increased demand for relevant empirical toxicity data and the evolution in toxicity testing, ECOTOX was recently updated with a new user interface, enhanced functionality for searching and exploring curated data, and inclusion of more mechanistic (e.g., genetic, enzymatic) and pathway-based (e.g., hormonal, cellular) data. Further, links to databases and tools were integrated, laying the foundation for future interoperability across sources of information on chemicals, species, and effects. Presented here is an overview of the ECOTOX Knowledgebase with vignettes demonstrating: 1) extent, distribution, and types of empirical toxicity data available; 2) exploration and visualization tools to identify relevant toxicity data for focused research questions and decision-making; and 3) efforts to increase interoperability for comparison to in vitro data, species comparisons/extrapolations, evaluation of field contaminants data, and development of adverse outcome pathways.