Priorities to improve the ecological risk assessment and management for pesticides in surface water

Abstract

This article deals with prospective and retrospective ecological risk assessment (ERA) procedures for pesticides in surface waters as carried out under European legislation (Regulation 1107/2009/EC; Directive 2009/128/EC; Directive 2000/60/EC). Priorities to improve the aquatic risk assessment and management of pesticides are discussed on basis of the following 5 theses: 1) the management of the environmental risks of pesticides in surface water requires an appropriate implementation of feedback mechanisms between prospective and retrospective ERA, 2) an appropriate ERA cannot be carried out without well-defined specific protection goals, described in terms of focal vulnerable populations and related exposure assessment goals, 3) the interaction between the assessment of exposure and eco(toxico)logical effects in ERA is at a lower level of sophistication than either assessment of exposure or assessment of effects in the field, 4) there is insufficient experimental proof that, in prospective ERA, the chronic effect assessment procedures accurately predict long-term population- and community-level impacts, and 5) multiple stress by pesticides in aquatic ecosystems cannot be ignored in ERA, but in individual water bodies, toxicity usually is dominated by a limited number of substances.

Evaluating aquatic invertebrate vulnerability to insecticides based on intrinsic sensitivity, biological traits, and toxic mode of action

“…Ecology-based approaches need to be developed to discriminate highly vulnerable taxa for which specific considerations should be taken, such as their inclusion in model ecosystem experiments or their evaluation under larger spatio-temporal scales making use of ecological models [25]. The main objective of the present study was to assess the vulnerability of different invertebrate taxa impacted by insecticide exposure by taking into account their intrinsic sensitivity and their population-level recovery potential.…”

New approaches to the ecological risk assessment of multiple stressors

“…Landis and Wiegers 2007;Brock 2013;Tarazona 2013;Van den Brink et al 2013), but these have either focussed on the effects of chemicals or did not include some important ecological considerations such as ecosystem-function endpoints or ecosystem processes. In the future, ecological risk assessments (beyond simple screening ERAs) will include multiple stressors in the initial problem-formulation stage.…”

Guidance for the prognostic risk assessment of nanomaterials in aquatic ecosystems

“…Simple approaches for tier-1 testing of aquatic organisms have been suggested by Brock (2013) and Diepens et al (2014). First, for the ENM of concern, the tier-1 and additional toxicity data for water organisms in the overlying water compartment would need to be collected, after which the most sensitive taxonomic group of water organisms is identified.…”