Data-poor ecological risk assessment of multiple stressors

Abstract

Multiple stressors to species and ecosystems are pervasive and escalating. Effective management and mitigation of these pressures requires ecological risk assessment (ERA), but data are often lacking for detailed, quantitative risk assessment. Data-poor ERAs have been developed and widely applied to terrestrial, marine, and freshwater ecosystems. Current frameworks, such as the Productivity-Susceptibility Analysis (PSA), are limited to single stressors and were not developed on statistical grounds. Previous work has partly addressed these limitations by incorporating multiple stressors (e.g. Aggregated Susceptibility) and a statistical basis (rPSA). However, the more robust rPSA is more difficult to implement than the PSA. To overcome this barrier, here we develop EcoRAMS (Ecological Risk Assessment of Multiple Stressors), which provides statistically-robust ecological risk assessments of multiple stressors in data-poor contexts. The web app format of EcoRAMS.net lowers the barrier of use for practitioners and scientists at any level of statistical training.