Traits and stress: keys to identify community effects of low levels of toxicants in test systems

Liess, Matthias; Beketov, Mikhail A.

doi:10.1007/s10646-011-0689-y

Cited by 123 publications

(88 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Guidance for the evaluation of concentration-response relationships of populations and communities statistically (using, for example, multivariate analysis) and ecologically (using, for example, traits (e.g. Liess and Beketov, 2011) can be found the AGD (EFSA PPR Panel, 2013, section 9.3.2.5). Guidance for interpretation of concentration-response relationships by means of effect classes can be found in section 9.3.5.3 of the AGD (EFSA PPR Panel, 2013).…”

Section: Evaluating Effects and Interpreting Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scientific Opinion on the effect assessment for pesticides on sediment organisms in edge‐of‐field surface water

2015

EFS2

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The EFSA Panel on Plant Protection Products and their Residues (PPR Panel) was tasked to revise the Guidance Document (GD) on Aquatic Ecotoxicology under Council Directive 91/414/EEC (SANCO/3268/2001 rev. 4 (final), 17 October 2002. This scientific opinion of the PPR Panel is the second of three requested deliverables within this mandate. The scientific background for the risk assessment on sediment organisms in edge-of-field surface waters is provided, with reference to benthic ecology and ecotoxicology, available test protocols and current knowledge on exposure and effects of sediment-bound plant protection products (PPPs). The scientific opinion provides approaches on how to derive regulatory acceptable concentrations (RACs) for sediment organisms and exposure to active substances of PPPs and transformation products of these substances, and how to link them in a tiered approach to predicted environmental concentrations (PECs) for the sediment compartment. A list of uncertainties in relation to such approaches is given. SUMMARYSediment Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA) is a combination of exposure and effect assessment. Proposals for these assessments are provided. The opinion describes specific protection goals (SPGs) for sediment-inhabiting organisms based on two options (1) the ecological threshold option (ETO), accepting negligible population effects only, and (2) if applicable, the ecological recovery option (ERO), accepting some population-level effects if ecological recovery takes place within an acceptable time period.Triggers for sediment ecotoxicity testing are proposed together with a decision scheme for when additional testing may be required. The ecotoxicologically relevant concentrations (ERCs) for sediment organisms are proposed, as this will be influenced by the choice of sediment layer, exposure metric and test duration.The current Forum for the co-ordination of pesticide fate models and their use (FOCUS) methodology for surface water does not consider the effect of multi-year applications, which could possibly lead to accumulation of pesticides in sediment. To account for this deficit, a proposed methodology for introducing an accumulation factor that can be used until an updated FOCUS methodology becomes available is presented in this opinion. The accumulation factor can be considered a conservative approach, since it does not include any possible transport processes, such as leaching or volatilisation, which may reduce the accumulation in sediment in the real field situation.A tiered effect assessment approach is proposed for different sediment organisms and how to link regulatory acceptable concentrations (RACs) to predicted environmental concentration (PECs). The assessment of bioaccumulation, biomagnification and secondary poisoning is discussed, as well as the prospect of improving ERA for sediment microorganisms.Transformation products from active substances also may need to be assessed, as well as mixture toxicity of formulations of plant protection products (PPPs). The op...

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Section: Evaluating Effects and Interpreting Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scientific Opinion on the effect assessment for pesticides on sediment organisms in edge‐of‐field surface water

2015

EFS2

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“…Such indicators are a) organisms at the species and/or community level including functional groups such as earthworms (Bouché 1977), trophic groups such as nematodes (Yeates 2003) or trait groups such as aquatic invertebrates (Liess and Beketov 2011); b) direct functional endpoints such as litter decomposition, biogeochemical cycles completion; c) indirect functional endpoints such as ecological functions provided by single species or communities (Hilbeck 2008a, b;Schmitt-Jansen et al 2008) and ecosystem services such as biodiversity and habitat provision and/or pollinators securing food crop production (Faber and van Wensem 2012;Mace et al 2012); and d) landscape-scale related indicators such as land use diversity which may be affected by altered rotation and other production schemes (Graef 2009). They must represent not only arable areas, but neighbouring receiving environments including wild habitats, where the GM crops may have a potential impact or could occur.…”

Section: Indicators and Sampling Methods (Tc1)mentioning

confidence: 99%

A framework for a European network for a systematic environmental impact assessment of genetically modified organisms (GMO)

Graef¹,

Römbke²,

Binimelis³

et al. 2012

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A peer-reviewed open-access journalFrieder Graef et al. / BioRisk 7: 73-97 (2012) AbstractThe assessment of the impacts of growing genetically modified (GM) crops remains a major political and scientific challenge in Europe. Concerns have been raised by the evidence of adverse and unexpected environmental effects and differing opinions on the outcomes of environmental risk assessments (ERA). The current regulatory system is hampered by insufficiently developed methods for GM crop safety testing and introduction studies. Improvement to the regulatory system needs to address the lack of well designed GM crop monitoring frameworks, professional and financial conflicts of interest within the ERA research and testing community, weaknesses in consideration of stakeholder interests and specific regional conditions, and the lack of comprehensive assessments that address the environmental and socio-economic risk assessment interface. To address these challenges, we propose a European Network for systematic GMO impact assessment (ENSyGMO) with the aim directly to enhance ERA and post-market environmental monitoring (PMEM) of GM crops, to harmonize and ultimately secure the long-term socio-political impact of the ERA process and the PMEM in the EU. These goals would be achieved with a multi-dimensional and multi-sector approach to GM crop impact assessment, targeting the variability and complexity of the EU agro-environment and the relationship with relevant socio-economic factors. Specifically, we propose to develop and apply methodologies for both indicator and field site selection for GM crop ERA and PMEM, embedded in an EU-wide typology of agro-environments. These methodologies should be applied in a pan-European field testing network using GM crops. The design of the field experiments and the sampling methodology at these field sites should follow specific hypotheses on GM crop effects and use state-of-the art sampling, statistics and modelling approaches. To address public concerns and create confidence in the ENSyGMO results, actors with relevant specialist knowledge from various sectors should be involved.

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“…This approach was adopted to study the effects of toxic contamination on invertebrate communities in running waters [15][16][17]. It was shown that tolerant taxa are characterized by resistance and resilience traits [e.g., high mobility (which permits avoidance of exposition and dispersion) and short life cycles (which allow rapid re-colonization after disturbance)].…”

Section: Community Functioning: Species Traitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Riverine invertebrate communities have been extensively studied in response to gradients of contamination, producing effective toxicity indices [15][16][17]. By contrast, benthic communities in lakes have still been rather neglected, since the ecological status of lentic ecosystems has for long been assessed on the basis of only chemical and physical parameters.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biomonitoring of lake sediments using benthic macroinvertebrates

Bettinetti

Ponti

Marziali

et al. 2012

TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry

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The Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC) is an innovative piece of legislation aimed at protecting the quality of all continental and coastal waters in Europe through an ecological evaluation of the ecosystems. Since it is widely acknowledged that the greater the ecological realism the greater the difficulty of its definition, we describe the different uses of benthic organisms as a tool for assessing the quality of sediment in lakes. We review the responses from single species to the community. We focus on studies in the laboratory and in the field, and we also critically consider the use of predictive models for these evaluations.Our discussion of the information collected underlines the importance of the relation between sensitivity of single species and contaminants. Moreover, the recent approach in developing mechanistic models to predict the response of natural communities seems to be particularly powerful for community ecology, and we strongly recommend more effort along these lines. ª

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Traits and stress: keys to identify community effects of low levels of toxicants in test systems

Cited by 123 publications

References 56 publications

Scientific Opinion on the effect assessment for pesticides on sediment organisms in edge‐of‐field surface water

Scientific Opinion on the effect assessment for pesticides on sediment organisms in edge‐of‐field surface water

A framework for a European network for a systematic environmental impact assessment of genetically modified organisms (GMO)

Biomonitoring of lake sediments using benthic macroinvertebrates

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