Abstract
Ecological risk assessments principally rely on simplified metrics of organismal sensitivity that do not consider mechanism or biological traits. As such, they are unable to adequately extrapolate from standard laboratory tests to real-world settings, and largely fail to account for the diversity of organisms and environmental variables that occur in natural environments. However, an understanding of how stressors influence organism health can compensate for these limitations. Mechanistic knowledge can be used to account for species differences in basal biological function and variability in environmental factors, including spatial and temporal changes in the chemical, physical and biological milieu. Consequently, physiological understanding of biological function, and how this is altered by stressor exposure, can facilitate proactive, predictive risk assessment. In this perspective article, existing frameworks that utilize physiological knowledge (e.g. biotic ligand models, adverse outcomes pathways and mechanistic effect models), are outlined, and specific examples of how mechanistic understanding has been used to predict risk are highlighted. Future research approaches and data needs for extending the incorporation of physiological information into ecological risk assessments are discussed. Although the review focuses on chemical toxicants in aquatic systems, physical and biological stressors and terrestrial environments are also briefly considered.
Highlights
Physiology provides the mechanism that underpins our understanding of ecology, evolution, health and disease
Ecological risk assessments principally rely on simplified metrics of organismal sensitivity that do not consider mechanism or biological traits
Ecological risk assessment seeks to determine whether a given chemical, physical or biological stressor will result in a negative ecological outcome
Summary
Physiology provides the mechanism that underpins our understanding of ecology, evolution, health and disease It facilitates the translation of molecular and cellular responses of individual organisms, to changes observed at the population, community and ecosystem scale (Somero, 2000). Environmental risk has been largely determined by monitoring the toxicity of stressors to individual model species, in controlled laboratory settings, using crude metrics such as mortality (Maruya et al, 2016) Risk assessments take individual-level impacts, which result from suborganismal perturbation, and seek to translate these effects to larger scales (Rohr et al, 2016) It is, surprising that environmental risk assessment has traditionally eschewed physiological approaches that would appear to contribute directly to regulatory goals. The aim of this work is to offer insight into the regulatory environment from a physiological perspective, and to identify where physiological knowledge has, and could further, contribute to risk assessment approaches
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