Potential application of population models in the European ecological risk assessment of chemicals II: Review of models and their potential to address environmental protection aims

Abstract

Whereas current chemical risk assessment (RA) schemes within the European Union (EU) focus mainly on toxicity and bioaccumulation of chemicals in individual organisms, most protection goals aim at preserving populations of nontarget organisms rather than individuals. Ecological models are tools rarely recommended in official technical documents on RA of chemicals, but are widely used by researchers to assess risks to populations, communities and ecosystems. Their great advantage is the relatively straightforward integration of the sensitivity of species to chemicals, the mode of action and fate in the environment of toxicants, life-history traits of the species of concern, and landscape features. To promote the usage of ecological models in regulatory risk assessment, this study tries to establish whether existing, published ecological modeling studies have addressed or have the potential to address the protection aims and requirements of the chemical directives of the EU. We reviewed 148 publications, and evaluated and analyzed them in a database according to defined criteria. Published models were also classified in terms of 5 areas where their application would be most useful for chemical RA. All potential application areas are well represented in the published literature. Most models were developed to estimate population-level responses on the basis of individual effects, followed by recovery process assessment, both in individuals and at the level of metapopulations. We provide case studies for each of the proposed areas of ecological model application. The lack of clarity about protection goals in legislative documents made it impossible to establish a direct link between modeling studies and protection goals. Because most of the models reviewed here were not developed for regulatory risk assessment, there is great potential and a variety of ecological models in the published literature.

Development of a framework based on an ecosystem services approach for deriving specific protection goals for environmental risk assessment of pesticides

“…Interest is recently growing for a wider application of population models for risk assessment of pesticides (e.g. Galic et al, 2010;Schmolke et al, 2010;Thorbek et al, 2010). However, challenges remain to develop a suite of models, incorporating the necessary level of ecological complexity that can be used at different tiers in the risk assessment of pesticides.…”

A framework for predicting impacts on ecosystem services from (sub)organismal responses to chemicals

“…Since then, various models describing different levels of biological organization have proved to be powerful tools for extrapolating impacts of chemicals across levels and scales [3,[38][39][40][41]. Recently, key scientific and regulatory organizations have advocated the use of mechanistic effects models in ERA [42][43][44][45].…”

The role of ecological models in linking ecological risk assessment to ecosystem services in agroecosystems

“…In the realms of ERA, the added value of ecological models in obtaining more realistic assessments of risk has been argued (Forbes et al, 2008(Forbes et al, , 2009Thorbek et al, 2009;Galic et al, 2010;Schmolke et al, 2010a;Wang and Grimm, 2010). Several different modeling approaches have been applied specifically to questions related to chemical risk assessment Schmolke et al, 2010b); their development and use are not, however, restricted to the field of ERA.…”

“…Modeling approaches may help overcome limitations of currently applied approaches to ecological risk assessment (Forbes et al, 2009;Thorbek et al, 2009;Galic et al, 2010) as they allow the inclusion of both intrinsic sensitivity to a toxicant and various relevant ecological factors in a single study. Modeling studies allow investigation of the impacts of various stressors on ecosystem components relevant for ecosystem services, and permit analysis at larger spatial and temporal scales than can be done experimentally.…”