Ecological Risk Assessment toward a Landscape Perspective

Abstract

The fundamental concepts of risk assessment are imbedded in our cultural prehistory. Then of course the considerations were intimately linked to daily survival: Was it safe to cross a river, attack a woolly mammoth, eat the camas bulbs, or enter the territory of hostile neighbors in search food, shelter, and treasure? Scientific inquiry enabled improved understanding of connections between events and consequences. For example, efforts by Pasteur and Koch established a basis for managing bacterial contaminants and thereby develop safeguards against diseases.The application of risk assessment and risk management to biological situations likely grew out of the science of epidemiology. Epidemiology, the study of diseases in populations (Schwabe et al. 1977), emerged as a formal discipline in the late 1800s following a severe cholera epidemic in London. The cause of the epidemic was traced to contaminated drinking water, and the solution was simple: Remove the pump handles from the contaminated wells. The process that was used to make the diagnosis and find the solution represented a new way of thinking, one that searched for patterns and traced linkages that could explain the observed phenomenon.But formal constructs of risk assessment as we know them today are relatively new. Though at one level, the procedures appear to be simple and the math is generally elementary, the execution of the procedures quickly becomes complicated. The many decisions that must be made in setting up an assessment, though none individually may seem very challenging, can become daunting with the interconnectedness of the suite Environmental Risk and Management from a Landscape Perspective, edited by Kapustka and Landis