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Ecosystem services are defined as the outputs of ecological processes that contribute to human welfare or have the potential to do so in the future. Those outputs include food and drinking water, clean air and water, and pollinated crops. The need to protect the services provided by natural systems has been recognized previously, but ecosystem services have not been formally incorporated into ecological risk assessment practice in a general way in the United States. Endpoints used conventionally in ecological risk assessment, derived directly from the state of the ecosystem (e.g., biophysical structure and processes), and endpoints based on ecosystem services serve different purposes. Conventional endpoints are ecologically important and susceptible entities and attributes that are protected under US laws and regulations. Ecosystem service endpoints are a conceptual and analytical step beyond conventional endpoints and are intended to complement conventional endpoints by linking and extending endpoints to goods and services with more obvious benefit to humans. Conventional endpoints can be related to ecosystem services even when the latter are not considered explicitly during problem formulation. To advance the use of ecosystem service endpoints in ecological risk assessment, the US Environmental Protection Agency's Risk Assessment Forum has added generic endpoints based on ecosystem services (ES-GEAE) to the original 2003 set of generic ecological assessment endpoints (GEAEs). Like conventional GEAEs, ES-GEAEs are defined by an entity and an attribute. Also like conventional GEAEs, ES-GEAEs are broadly described and will need to be made specific when applied to individual assessments. Adoption of ecosystem services as a type of assessment endpoint is intended to improve the value of risk assessment to environmental decision making, linking ecological risk to human well-being, and providing an improved means of communicating those risks. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2016;12:522-528. Published 2015 SETAC. This article is a US Government work and, as such, is in the public domain in the USA.

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Abstract-The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reevaluating the risks associated with 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzop-dioxin and related chlorinated hydrocarbons (CHCs). Most information currently available concerning CHC toxic action and biological effects focuses on the responses of individual organisms, as opposed to the potential impacts of CHCs on populations, communities, or ecosystems. In support of EPA's reevaluation, survivorship and reproduction data from two previous studies involving the estuarine fish, Fundulus heteroclitus (Linnaeus), exposed as adults to either dioxin or polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), were interpreted at the population level using a stage-classified model of F. heteroclitus population dynamics. The studies differed with respect to the route of exposure of the parental stock: dietary exposure to dioxin in the laboratory and natural exposure to PCBs at the New Bedford Harbor, Massachusetts marine Superfund site. The CHC effects documented in these studies were used to modify fertility and survivorship in the population model. The finite population multiplication (growth) rate, estimated using the model, was used as the measure of population-level effect. In both cases, a negative relationship was observed between CHC dose (quantified as dioxin whole-body burden and liver burden of non-ortho-and mono-ortho-substituted PCB congeners) and population growth rate. The dose-response relationships developed in this study provide useful information for assessing the ecological risks of CHCs to estuarine fish populations.

The complex, widely dispersed, and cumulative environmental challenges currently facing society require holistic, transdisciplinary approaches to resolve. The concept of ecosystem services (ES) has become more widely accepted as a framework that fosters a broader systems perspective of sustainability and can make science more responsive to the needs of decision makers and the public. Successful transdisciplinary approaches require a common language and understanding of key concepts. Our primary objective is to encourage the ES research and policy communities to standardize terminology and definitions, to facilitate mutual understanding by multidisciplinary researchers and policy makers. As an important step toward standardization, we present a lexicon developed to inform ES research conducted by the US Environmental Protection Agency and its partners. We describe a straightforward conceptualization of the relationships among environmental decisions, their effects on ecological systems and the services they provide, and human well-being. This provides a framework for common understanding and use of ES terminology. We encourage challenges to these definitions and attempts to advance standardization of a lexicon in ways that might be more meaningful to our ultimate objective: informing environmental decisions in ways that promote the sustainability of the environment upon which we all depend.

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Hazardous site management in the United States includes remediation of contaminated environmental media and restoration of injured natural resources. Site remediation decisions are informed by ecological risk assessment (ERA), whereas restoration and compensation decisions are informed by the natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) process. Despite similarities in many of their data needs and the advantages of more closely linking their analyses, ERA and NRDA have been conducted largely independently of one another. This is the 4th in a series of papers reporting the results of a recent workshop that explored how ERA and NRDA data needs and assessment processes could be more closely linked. Our objective is to evaluate the technical underpinnings of recentmethods used to translate natural resource injuries into ecological service losses and to propose ways to enhance the usefulness of data obtained in ERAs to the NRDA process. Three aspects are addressed: 1) improving the linkage among ERA assessment endpoints and ecological services evaluated in the NRDA process, 2) enhancing ERA data collection and interpretation approaches to improve translation of ERA measurements in damage assessments, and 3) highlighting methods that can be used to aggregate service losses across contaminants and across natural resources. We propose that ERA and NRDA both would benefit by focusing ecological assessment endpoints on the ecosystem services that correspond most directly to restoration and damage compensation decisions, and we encourage development of generic ecosystem service assessment endpoints for application in hazardous site investigations. To facilitate their use in NRDA, ERA measurements should focus on natural resource species that affect the flow of ecosystem services most directly, should encompass levels of biological organization above organisms, and should be made with the use of experimental designs that support description of responses to contaminants as continuous (as opposed to discrete) variables. Application of a data quality objective process, involving input from ERA and NRDA practitioners and site decision makers alike, can facilitate identification of data collection and analysis approaches that will benefit both assessment processes. Because of their demonstrated relationships to a number of important ecosystem services, we recommend that measures of biodiversity be targeted as key measurement endpoints in ERA to support the translation between risk and service losses. Building from case studies of recent successes, suggestions are offered for aggregating service losses at sites involving combinations of chemicals and multiple natural resource groups. Recognizing that ERA and NRDA are conducted for different purposes, we conclude that their values to environmental decision making can be enhanced by more closely linking their data collection and analysis activities.