Ecological Harm and Economic Damages of Chemical Contamination to Linked Aquatic‐Terrestrial Food Webs: A Study‐Design Tool for Practitioners

Abstract

Contamination of aquatic ecosystems can have cascading effects on terrestrial consumers by altering the availability and quality of aquatic insect prey. Comprehensive assessment of these indirect food‐web effects of contaminants on natural resources and their associated services necessitates using both ecological and economic tools. In the present study we present an aquatic‐terrestrial assessment tool (AT2), including ecological and economic decision trees, to aid practitioners and researchers in designing contaminant effect studies for linked aquatic‐terrestrial insect‐based food webs. The tool is tailored to address the development of legal claims by the US Department of the Interior's Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration Program, which aims to restore natural resources injured by oil spills and hazardous substance releases into the environment. Such cases require establishing, through scientific inquiry, the existence of natural resource injury as well as the determination of the monetary or in‐kind project‐based damages required to restore this injury. However, this tool is also useful to researchers interested in questions involving the effects of contaminants on linked aquatic‐terrestrial food webs. Stylized cases exemplify how application of AT2 can help practitioners and researchers design studies when the contaminants present at a site are likely to lead to injury of terrestrial aerial insectivores through loss of aquatic insect prey and/or dietary contaminant exposure. Designing such studies with ecological endpoints and economic modeling inputs in mind will increase the relevance and cost‐effectiveness of studies, which can in turn improve the outcomes of cases and studies involving the ecological effects of contaminants on food webs. Environ Toxicol Chem 2023;00:1–11. Published 2023. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of SETAC.

A novel approach to assessing natural resource injury with Bayesian networks

“…These scientific outputs can then be used as inputs for economic models to assign dollar values to injury using methods such as habitat equivalency analysis (HEA) and resource equivalency analysis (REA; Baker et al, 2020). Designing relevant and costeffective studies in NRDAR cases-especially those that consider indirect food web effects of contaminants-is sorely needed (Kraus et al, 2023).…”

“…To assess injury, trustees from state, tribal, and/or federal agencies form case teams that include scientists, economists, and solicitors to conduct a damage assessment for individual sites or incidents (i.e., a NRDAR case). Integral to this process is technical scientific support to identify and measure injury to natural resources for economists and solicitors to determine the monetary or project-based natural resource claims for restoration (Kraus et al, 2023); however, assessment of injury to the environment can be challenging. Common issues that affect the ability of researchers to demonstrate natural resource injury include: (1) limited evidentiary data; (2) difficulty characterizing contaminant fate and effects, including contaminant mixtures; (3) confusing and complicated interpretation of statistically measured outcomes; (4) difficulty defining the temporal and spatial scales; and (5) lack of baseline data.…”

Ecological Theory and Concepts in Ecotoxicology

“…Modeling outputs suggest that sublethal contaminant effects on insect biomass potentially control this exposure pathway efficiently-a finding that requires further verification. In a linked study, Kraus et al (2023) propose an assessment tool, which considers ecological and economic decision trees, to aid in the design of contaminant effect studies for linked aquatic-terrestrial insect-based food webs.…”