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The ECOTOXicology Knowledgebase Literature Search and Review Processes for Identifying and Curating Toxicity Data for Ecological Risk Assessments (SETAC 22)
Citation:
Hoff, D., J. Olker, J. Berninger, K. Nehiba, T. Scott, T. Karschnik, AND A. Pilli. The ECOTOXicology Knowledgebase Literature Search and Review Processes for Identifying and Curating Toxicity Data for Ecological Risk Assessments (SETAC 22). Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) North America Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA, November 13 - 17, 2022. https://doi.org/10.23645/epacomptox.21603264
Impact/Purpose:
Presentation to the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) annual meeting November 2022. The ECOTOXicology Knowledgebase (ECOTOX) is the world’s largest compilation of curated environmental toxicity data on aquatic life, terrestrial plants, and wildlife. ECOTOX was developed to address the need to rapidly identify relevant toxicity data for risk assessment and management with methods that are also thorough, cost-effective, and transparent methods. The development of the Knowledgebase started in the early 1980s with three taxa specific databases which were combined in 1996 into ECOTOX, where single-chemical ecotoxicity data continue to be added every quarter and made available on a public-facing website (www.epa.gov/ecotox). This presentation provides an overview of the ECOTOX pipeline for literature searches, review of citations, and abstraction of study information and toxicity test results. ECOTOX continues to be a valuable resource to support assemblage and review of existing toxicity data for chemical decision-making. Incorporation of new tools and methods and the updated user interface improve the efficiency of the ECOTOX pipeline and make the curated data more accessible for end users
Description:
The ECOTOXicology Knowledgebase (ECOTOX) is a widely recognized source of verified curated single chemical toxicity data for aquatic and terrestrial organisms. Originally developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) to provide regulators with rapid access to ecological toxicity data, ECOTOX has been providing curated data for use in broad applications in environmental research and risk assessments for over 30 years. ECOTOX continues to evolve to support the need for more information at a faster pace to make regulatory decisions through incorporation of transparent state-of-the-art practices in literature data curation and increased interoperability to other relevant digital applications. The well-established ECOTOX literature review and data curation protocols have now been aligned with current systematic review practices and lexicon for comprehensive literature searches, title/abstract screening followed by full-text review, inclusion/exclusion criteria, and data extraction from acceptable studies following controlled vocabularies. Extracted data contains sufficient chemical, methodological, and toxicity information to support study quality evaluations and data syntheses/reviews by groups internal and external to the USEPA. ECOTOX protocols have recently incorporated automated and semi-automated data analytic tools and techniques including applications for automated literature searching, machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques for title and abstract screening of references, and pre-populating data evaluation records. In addition, ECOTOX has incorporated standard species and chemical identifiers and there are on-going efforts to harmonize terminologies with existing ontologies, which will allow integration with chemical, species, and biological data sources to inform risk assessment. ECOTOX will continue to provide empirical toxicity data, and the recent incorporation of more efficient processes, along with enhanced ECOTOX interoperability with other data sources, will aid in meeting the current demand for rapid access to toxicity data for risk assessment and environmental research. This abstract does not necessarily reflect US EPA policy.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: The ECOTOXicology Knowledgebase Literature Search and Review Processes for Identifying and Curating Toxicity Data for Ecological Risk Assessments (SETAC 22)
HOFF_ECOTOX_OVERVIEW_SETAC_PITTSBURGH.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 4428.741 KB, about PDF)