Integrating Environmental Fate and Effects Information: The Keys to Ecotoxicological Risk Assessment for Pesticides

Abstract

The last 25 years have seen significant advances in analytical chemistry that have allowed more rapid, precise and accurate analysis of substances such as pesticides in environmental matrices. This increased capacity has generated fate and concentration data sets in the spatial and temporal dimensions. In this same time period, the science of environmental toxicology has grown prodigiously and our knowledge of the effects of many substances in a range of environmentally important species has multiplied. Traditional approaches to environmental risk assessment have not used these large data sets well and fail to recognize important differences between human health and environmental risk assessment. The recognition in several jurisdictions of the usefulness of distributional or probabilistic methods to characterize exposure and effects information has resulted in new approaches to ecological risk assessment that will increasingly be applied to pesticides in the environment. These approaches also provide useful planning and priority setting tools for analytical chemists seeking to maximize the utility of their data for risk assessment purposes and to focus their sampling on regions or use patterns where more data will better characterize high putative risks.