Citation:

Forbes, V. AND Sandy Raimondo. Challenges and opportunities for using population modeling to assess risks of pesticides to threatened and endangered species. 2022 SETAC North America Annual Meeting, Pittsburg, PA, November 13 - 17, 2022.

Impact/Purpose:

This invited presentation will provide an overview of advances in mechanistic models for ecological risk assessment, highlighting a special issue of the journal Ecologies which demonstrate transferrability of the recently published Pop-GUIDE framework.

Description:

Although population modeling has a long history as a decision support tool in conservation and fisheries biology, its use to inform ecological risk assessments (ERA) has been limited. Advances in methodology, publication of numerous case studies, and improved guidance in model development, documentation, and evaluation demonstrate the value of population modeling over traditional effects assessments that are largely based on individual-level, toxicological responses of standard test species. Whereas the European Union has been slowly moving forward to incorporate population models and other mechanistic effect models in pesticide risk assessments, US government agencies have not. This presentation will discuss recent advances in Population modeling Guidance, Use, Interpretation, and Development for ERA (Pop-GUIDE), particularly in the context of assessing risks of pesticides to threatened and endangered species in a scientifically defensible manner. We will highlight recently published models for threatened and endangered species that have followed Pop-GUIDE, discuss challenges in expanding the use of population models for listed species decision support, and recommend steps to move their application forward.

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