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The Fish Toxicity Translator: A Next Generation Tool for Population Modeling to Support Ecological Risk Assessment
Citation:
Pollesch, N., S. Kadlec, K. Flynn, Sandy Raimondo, AND M. Etterson. The Fish Toxicity Translator: A Next Generation Tool for Population Modeling to Support Ecological Risk Assessment. SETAC North America, Duluth, MN, November 15 - 19, 2020. https://doi.org/10.23645/epacomptox.13171961
Impact/Purpose:
Presenting ecotoxicological population modeling tools developed for EPA risk assessors and other partners and stakeholders provides an opportunity to share current development and capabilities and also solicit feedback for further refinement of the tools and methodology being developed. These Toxicity Translator tools fill an important gap between laboratory toxicity studies and interpretation of those study results in a broader ecological context more relevant to environmental protection goals.
Description:
Populations of aquatic organisms are exposed to diverse natural and anthropogenic stressors. Traditional toxicity testing provides endpoints that need to be interpreted and extrapolated in order to understand impacts of exposure on wildlife populations. The Fish Toxicity Translator is a mechanistic population model developed by the USEPA that uses life history characteristics of fish, laboratory derived measures of acute and chronic toxicity, and ecotoxicological theory to estimate population level effects of chemical exposure scenarios. The Fish Toxicity Translator uses a novel modeling approach, size-structured integral projection modeling, that allows for the incorporation of size-dependent acute and chronic effects of chemical and non-chemical stressors. Model development has taken place in the open source R language has been developed into an R package with an accompanying graphical user interface using R Shiny. In this talk I will describe the modeling theory supporting the Fish Toxicity Translator and give a demonstration of the Fish Toxicity Translator tool that is being developed to support ecological risk assessors.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: The Fish Toxicity Translator: A Next Generation Tool for Population Modeling to Support Ecological Risk Assessment