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Weight of Evidence for Community-Level Risk Assessments
Citation:
Sharpe, L., Sandy Raimondo, AND L. Oliver. Weight of Evidence for Community-Level Risk Assessments. Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry Southeast Region Annual Meeting, Dauphin Island, Alabama, August 16 - 18, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
A community-level risk assessment Weight of Evidence approach allows risk assessors to establish protection goals for multiple species in a single risk assessment process. This new Weight of Evidence approach can be applied to protect the entire community by identifying focal species within the community.
Description:
Weight of evidence (WoE) approaches (i.e. processes used to assess the evidence in support of a hypothesis) are used, whether formally or informally, in all scientific work. There are a wide variety of WoE approaches, including the use of p-values to set significance levels to qualitatively described best professional judgement. In regulatory contexts, such as risk assessments for Endangered Species Actlisted species and their critical habitat, the WoE approaches used must uphold the burden needed to justify regulatory action as well as communicate the findings clearly and transparently to a wide range of audiences. WoE approaches are appropriate at all risk assessment phases (i.e. evaluation of exposure risks, evaluation of effects risks, risk integration), and are of particular use when taking a community-level, rather than a species-level, approach for evaluating risks of a particular stressor to all listed species relying on a specific type of critical habitat. The community-level approach allows risk assessors to establish protection goals for multiple species in a single risk assessment process, and also adds significant complexity to the process. We propose a new WoE approach that can be applied to protect the entire community by identifying focal species within the community.