Mussel Caging and the Weight of Evidence Approach in the Assessment of Chemical Contamination in Coastal Waters of Finland (Baltic Sea)

Application of a Multidisciplinary Weight of Evidence Approach as a Tool for Monitoring the Ecological Risk of Dredging Activities

“…In such a context, investigation on sublethal alterations in organisms provides early warning signals of disturbance, revealing the onset of stressful conditions before these progress toward higher levels of biological organization (Regoli et al, 2004;Benedetti et al, 2012). Although the benefits of evaluating sublethal effects in transplanted mussels are now widely recognized, their application is still limited to research purposes and has not yet been included in the normative regulating monitoring programs due to the difficulties in summarizing the effects and communicating the biological significance of observations (Lehtonen et al, 2019). In this study, the elaboration of biomarkers evaluated in transplanted mussels during the different campaigns allowed to synthesize ∼1,000 results obtained from 17 biological processes, revealing low hazard at cellular level arising from steady fluctuations of certain markers.…”

“…Bioaccumulation of chemicals in wild or transplanted organisms provides information on bioavailability, whereas measuring sublethal biological effects allows a sensitive early-warning sight at the molecular, cellular, and functional level, highlighting alterations and mechanisms of action prognostic for the onset of adverse effects at higher levels of biological organization (Broeg and Lehtonen, 2006;Moore et al, 2006;Regoli and Giuliani, 2014;Benedetti et al, 2015). Such integration of chemicals in abiotic matrices, their bioavailability, biomarkers, bioassays, and benthic communities have been developed in recent years through the quantitative WOE model Sediqualsoft, applied in various environmental risk assessment case-studies (Benedetti et al, 2014;Bebianno et al, 2015;Mestre et al, 2017;Lehtonen et al, 2019;Regoli et al, 2019;Morroni et al, 2020;Manfra et al, 2021). Different LOEs are independently elaborated through specific and weighted criteria, which provide both quantitative and qualitative hazard indices before their final integration in a WOE assessment (Piva et al, 2011;Regoli et al, 2019).…”

Effects of pollution on marine organisms

“…Collection, transport, and time elapsed before dissection should always be reported to aid interpretation of results. Lehtonen et al (2019) transplanted caged mussels ( M. trossulus ) for 2 months at 10 sites off the coast of Finland. Biomarker responses (CAT, GR, GST activity and LPO in digestive gland, AChE activity in gills), and CI were combined with chemical characterization of water (some compounds via passive sampling), bioaccumulation, benthic community status and water quality in a weight‐of‐evidence approach to determine the health status of the sites.…”

An innovative index to incorporate transcriptomic data into weight of evidence approaches for environmental risk assessment

“…As recently debated in Suter (2021) and in Johnson et al (2021), when dealing with multiple and heterogeneous bodies of evidence, the use of an integrated framework should be encouraged to comprehend causal relations and correctly estimate the likelihood of hazard posed by chemical contaminants of concern. The integration of different studies can be pursued by means of a quantitative Weight of Evidence (QWoE) approach (US Environmental Protection Agency, 2016), with several examples of methods and applications available in the literature (e.g., Gottardo et al, 2011;Micheletti et al, 2011;Piva et al, 2011;Benedetti et al, 2012;Bebianno et al, 2015;Fan et al, 2015;Barjhoux et al, 2018;Lehtonen et al, 2019). In a QWoE approach, multiple and heterogeneous data are organized into distinct lines of evidence (LoEs) (Chapman et al, 2002), to be then denoted by synthetic indices specifying the class of hazard, and eventually harmonized together using weighing or ranking (Linkov et al, 2009).…”