Science Inventory

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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...

Cross species extrapolation is a challenge in chemical safety evaluations due to a lack of empirical data and the use of model organisms as surrogate species. To address this challenge the Sequence Alignment to Predict Across Species Susceptibility (SeqAPASS) tool has been create...

Extracts of surface water from the Laurentian Great Lakes basin, and various locations across the United States have been shown to activate human peroxisome proliferator activated receptors (PPARs), retinoid X receptor beta (RXRb), and glucocorticoid receptor (GR). At present, id...

Extracts of surface water from the Laurentian Great Lakes basin, and various locations across the United States have been shown to activate human peroxisome proliferator activated receptors (PPARs), retinoid X receptor beta (RXRb), and glucocorticoid receptor (GR). At present, id...

The mission of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to protect human health and the environment. To accomplish this mission, EPA develops and enforces regulations, provides grants for state environmental programs, and provides environmental information through its Of...

Risk managers are charged with interpretation of Ecological Risk Assessments (ERA) and need to ensure decisions reflect a strong scientific basis of the models used and understand uncertainties of both the models and assessments. Model uncertainty is directly connected to model c...

The Sequence Alignment to Predict Across Species Susceptibility (SeqAPASS) tool was first released in January of 2016. It was created to address challenges the Agency faces in extrapolating chemical toxicity data/knowledge generated from model organisms or surrogate species to al...

The U.S. EPA routinely uses avian and 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. While there are multiple...

The Sequence Alignment to Predict Across Species Susceptibility (SeqAPASS) tool was first released in January of 2016. It was created to address challenges the Agency faces in extrapolating chemical toxicity data/knowledge generated from model organisms or surrogate species to al...

The Sequence Alignment to Predict Across Species Susceptibility (SeqAPASS) tool was first released in January of 2016. It was created to address challenges the Agency faces in extrapolating chemical toxicity data/knowledge generated from model organisms or surrogate species to al...

Ecological risk assessment is challenged by the need to assess hazard to the diverse communities of organisms inhabiting aquatic and terrestrial systems. Computational approaches, such as Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships (QSAR) and Interspecies Correlation Estimation...

Changes in size at and time to metamorphosis indicate developmental effects in amphibians that could result in population-level impacts. Current risk assessment practice uses early life stage fish data when data for larval amphibians are not available. While fish are sufficiently...

The regulation of pesticide uses is based on the local Risk Assessment frameworks, including a specific framework for pollinators. These frameworks rely on data from honey bee toxicity in a three-tiered process, from laboratory to semi-field to field settings, and exposure estima...

Omics approaches incorporated into standard toxicity tests can provide valuable information that can be used to inform the ecological risk assessment process. Specifically, the field of toxicogenomics, and its subdisciplines of transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, can be...

The Web-ICE tool is a user friendly interface that contains modules to predict acute toxicity to over 500 species of aquatic (algae, invertebrates, fish) and terrestrial (birds and mammals) taxa. The tool contains a suite of over 3000 ICE models developed from a database of over ...