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The Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) convened a Pellston workshop in 2022 to examine how information on climate change could be better incorporated into the ecological risk assessment (ERA) process for chemicals as well as other environmental stressors. A...

An understanding of the combined effects of climate change (CC) and other anthropogenic stressors, such as chemical exposures, is essential for improving ecological risk assessments of vulnerable ecosystems. In the Great Barrier Reef, coral reefs are under increasingly severe dur...

A key question in understanding the implications of climate change is how to integrate ecological risk assessments that focus on contaminants with the environmental alterations from climate predictions. This report summarizes the results of integrating climate change with the use...

Wildfires have increased in frequency and area burned, trends expected to continue with climate change. Among other effects, fires release pollutants into the atmosphere, representing a risk to human health and downwind terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. While human health risks...

We present a Northern European case study from the SETAC Pellston workshop in June 2022 on integration of global climate change (GCC) modeling into ecological risk assessment. In Northern Europe, GCC is expected to result in increased temperatures and precipitation. The changes i...

The problem formulation stage of an ecological risk assessment defines the scope of the analysis by delineating the ecosystems at risk, the characteristics of the stressors, the assessment and measurement endpoints, the exposure pathways between the stressor source and endpoints,...

Problem formulation (PF) is a critical initial step in planning risk assessments for chemical exposures to wildlife, used either explicitly or implicitly in various jurisdictions to include registration of new pesticides, evaluation of new and existing chemicals released to the e...

Amphibian populations are threatened by multiple potential stressors, including environmental variability and climate-related changes in habitat availability. A contributing factor in changing ecosystems is the availability of breeding habitat for anuran amphibians that are depen...

Amphibian populations are threatened by multiple potential stressors, including environmental variability and climate-related changes in habitat availability.  Ecological risk assessment of amphibians ideally should encompass the appropriate spatial and temporal scale to ade...

Estimating ecological risks from climate change requires knowledge of the exposure to multiple stressors along with the susceptibility of the ecological resources to these stressors. Uncertainty and variability are essential components for calculating risks in future conditions. ...

This chapter aims to introduce the reader to the basic principles of environmental risk assessment of chemicals and highlights the usefulness of tiered approaches within weight of evidence approaches in relation to problem formulation i.e., data availability, time and resource av...

Wildfire risks and losses have increased over the last 100 years, associated with population expansion, land use and management practices, and global climate change. While there have been extensive efforts at modeling the probability and severity of wildfires, there have been few...

Wildfire risks and losses have increased over the last 100 years, associated with population expansion, land use and management practices, and global climate change, with more than 30% of the global land surface experiencing significant fire frequency. While there have been exten...

While the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (USEPA) implementation of high-throughput (HTP) screening, as represented by the ToxCast and Tox21 efforts, have largely focused on human health, there is a need for HTP assays that address pathways and physiology unique to aqu...

While the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (USEPA) implementation of high-throughput (HTP) screening, as represented by the ToxCast and Tox21 efforts, have largely focused on human health, there is a need for HTP assays that address pathways and physiology unique to aqu...

Bayesian networks (BNs, also known as Bayesian belief networks) are a means of describing cause and effect using directed acyclic graphs where the interactions between the nodes are described using conditional probability tables. That is a way of saying that that there are nodes...

Temperature strongly affects performance in ectotherms. As ocean warming continues, performance of marine species will be impacted. Many studies have focused on how warming will impact physiology, life history, and behavior, but few studies have investigated how ecological and be...

Risk assessment is the evaluation to determine the chance of harmful effects to human health or ecological systems resulting from exposure to an environmental stressor. A stressor is any physical, chemical, or biological entity that can induce an adverse response. Stressors may a...

Mercury is released from a variety of sources and exhibits a complicated chemistry. The primary exposure pathway for humans and wildlife is the consumption of contaminated fish. The goal of this research is to provide the scientific information needed for EPA to assess and manag...

The U .S. EP A's Regional Vulnerability Assessment (ReVA) program addresses the latter phases of an integrated ecological risk assessment (U .S. EP A 1998) by building on available monitoring data, focusing on synthesizing information on spatial patterns, analyzing and displaying...

One of the early operating principles of landscape ecology was the importance of studying the <br>movement of energy, nutrients, and biota in the horizontal or x,y plane (Risser et al. 1984). The new focus on horizontal movement was in part based on the recognition that many ecol...

Environmental chemistry is applied to estimating the exposure of ecosystems and humans to various chemical environmental stressors. Among the stressors of concern are mercury, pesticides, and arsenic. Advanced analytical chemistry techniques are used to measure these stressors ...

<B>What is an ecological risk assessment?</B><br>An ecological risk assessment evaluates the potential adverse effects of human activities on the plants and animals that make up ecosystems. The risk assessment process provides a way to develop, organize and present scientific inf...

A watershed ecological risk assessment of Waquoit Bay, located on the south coast of Cape Cod, MA, was performed for managers to better understand the environmental impacts of human activities. An interdisciplinary and interagency workgroup identified all the stressors of concer...

To effectively manage watersheds, the assessment of watershed ecological response to physicochemical stressors such as nutrients, sediments, pathogens, and toxics over broad spatial and temporal scales is needed. Assessments at this level of complexity requires the development of...