Science Inventory

Protecting a diversity of species from the adverse effects of chemicals is a significant environmental challenge. Information on the effects of chemicals on species is either limited or lacking entirely, making management and mitigation of environmental contaminants difficult. Th...

Webinar presentation for CCTE monthly science webinar, November 30, 2022.  The presentation provides an overview of a custom Data Mart and a pilot software application tentatively branded the "R10 RAPID TOX app" which was developed to bring together multiple C...

Ecological risk assessments for potential pesticide impacts on listed species must ensure that decisions to grant registration will not jeopardize species or their critical habitats. Pesticides are designed to cause lethality to pest species via physiological pathways that are al...

A significant challenge in effects assessments conducted for chemical evaluations and deriving protective ecological values is the limited amount of data available for evaluating a chemical’s toxicity to the diversity of taxa found in the environment. Species sensitivity da...

Without minimum data requirements under TSCA, EPA/OPPT often conducts risk evaluations using limited empirical toxicity data. A modeling approach, Web-based Interspecies Correlation Estimation (Web-ICE), predicts toxicity values for environmental species that are absent...

Although mechanistic effect models are widely recognized as potentially valuable tools in Ecological Risk Assessment (ERA), the endpoints they yield are different from those that have been traditionally applied and the lack of “bright lines” has prevented them from be...

In the environment, fish are often exposed to cationic metals from mining activities, roadway runoff, and other sources. Data are needed on the influence of taxonomic relatedness regarding the molecular impacts from metal exposures among closely related taxa to help inform decisi...

The U.S. EPA frequently uses avian or fish toxicity data to set protective standards for amphibians in ecological risk assessments. However, this approach does not always adequately represent aquatic-dwelling and terrestrial-phase amphibian exposure data. For instance, it is acce...

The cladocerans Daphnia magna and Ceriodaphnia dubia have been used for decades to assess the hazards of chemicals and effluents, but toxicity data for these species have traditionally been treated separately. Numerous standard acute and chronic test guideline...

Interspecies correlation estimation (ICE) models are linear regressions that predict toxicity to a species with few data using a known toxicity value in a surrogate species. ICE models are well established for estimating toxicity to fish and aquatic invertebrates but have not bee...

Standardized laboratory tests with a limited number of model species are a key component of chemical risk assessments. These surrogate species cannot represent the entire diversity of native species, but there are practical and ethical objections against testing chemicals in a la...