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ECOTOX Knowledgebase.
Citation:
Elonen, C. ECOTOX Knowledgebase. U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development, Washington, DC, EPA/600/F-18/260, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
The ECOTOX Knowledgebase is a comprehensive, publicly available application providing chemical environmental toxicity data on aquatic life, terrestrial plants and wildlife. Data are curated from the scientific literature after an exhaustive search protocol. It is updated quarterly and as of June 2018, data were available for over 11,500 chemicals and 12,590 species from 47,800 references capturing more than 910,400 test results. In addition to facilitating efficient mining of ecotoxicology information, ECOTOX is used to develop and validate models to extrapolate data from in vitro (cell-based) to in vivo (whole organism) effects and across species to evaluate the safety of chemicals. The Knowledgebase is also useful for building quantitative structure activity relationship (QSAR) models to predict toxicity based on physical characteristics of a chemical’s structure, as well as to conduct data gap and meta-analyses to support current or guide future research and assessment needs.
Description:
Researchers, decision makers, and risk assessors can use ECOTOX to efficiently mine data while reducing the need for animal tests and to develop site-specific criteria or interpret findings from monitoring data for chemicals without established criteria. New features, including a search feature, explore feature, and data visualization feature have been added to ECOTOX and are described in this fact sheet.