Salmon and Complexity: Challenges to Assessment

Salmon in the U.S. Pacific Northwest are in widespread decline despite countless environmental assessment studies and billions of dollars spent. Having been involved in environmental assessment for more than three decades, I am forced to conclude that this decline tells us that our established practices of assessment and management are fundamentally deficient. Rather than studying the salmon, we should examine our own practices. These practices presume that, if individual actions are found to be beneficial through analytical assessments, the cumulative outcomes of many actions will also be beneficial. This “linear” presumption is embedded in institutions, analytical methods, and assessment practices. For a whole class of emerging problems, including declining salmon, this presumption is fundamentally wrong. Declining salmon provide a warning that our own analytical habits of thought and notions of progress are leading to outcomes that are both destructive and contrary to our best intentions. This paper is a response to this warning.     

Improving the Applicability of Quantitative Ecological Risk Assessment Tools—Understanding Demand-Side Changes

Quantitative ecological risk assessment (ERA) methods are the tools of choice for many natural resource management agencies and practitioners. However, a number of researchers and practitioners have recently highlighted that the application of quantitative ERA tools has perhaps been somewhat limited and this has stimulated discussion on the limitations of these methods, considered to be supply-side limitations in this analysis. By contrast, it is argued here that the demand for risk assessment tools has also changed substantively and this also acts to limit the use of ERA approaches. In particular, demand has changed through an increasing expectation that quantitative ERA tools will be able to capture ecosystem-scale, and sometimes global-scale interactions to support ecosystem-based management approaches. Similarly, the burgeoning use of market-based policy instruments often underpinned by the allocation of private property rights to an increasing number of ecosystem goods and services has fundamentally changed many natural resource management issues into allocation conflicts between alternate rights-holders. These demand-side changes represent both an opportunity and a challenge for developers of quantitative ERA tools.     

Microbial Endpoints: The Rationale for their Exclusion as Ecological Assessment Endpoints

The functional importance of bacteria and fungi in terrestrial systems is recognized widely. However, microbial population, community, and functional measurement endpoints change rapidly and across very short spatial scales. Measurement endpoints of microbes tend to be highly responsive to typical fluxes of temperature, moisture, oxygen, and many other noncontaminant factors. Functional redundancy across broad taxonomic groups enables wild swings in community composition without remarkable change in rates of decomposition or community respiration. Consequently, it is exceedingly difficult to relate specific microbial activities with indications of adverse and unacceptable environmental conditions. Moreover, changes in microbial processes do not necessarily result in consequences to plant and animal populations or communities, which in the end are the resources most commonly identified as those to be protected. Therefore, unless more definitive linkages are made between specific microbial effects and an adverse condition for typical assessment endpoint species, microbial endpoints will continue to have limited use in risk assessments; they will not drive the process as primary assessment endpoints.     

区域生态风险管理研究进展

近20a来,随着生态风险评价研究的不断深化,区域生态风险评价的理论和方法日臻完善,与此紧密相关的生态风险管理日益受到了广泛关注.生态风险管理具有基于监控的反馈机制、风险受害者参与、程序灵活非线性化、关注成本效益等共同点.总结了国内外生态风险管理的研究进展,发现近年来生态风险管理的研究多是基于生态风险评价的结果,针对不同的风险类型和等级采取不同的管理措施.国内现有的研究对灾害风险管理的体系、机制建设较为成熟,但区域生态风险管理的机制研究尤其是预警和防范方面研究尚不成熟.基于此,构建了基于风险来临前、风险到来时和风险过后的区域生态风险管理的基本框架,研究结果对生态风险管理理论的构建和实践应用具有重要的意义.     

生态风险评价及研究进展

生态风险是当前环境管理研究领域中的一个热点问题,其研究着重关注化学、物理和生物的胁迫因子可能对生态系统或其组分的有害影响.生态风险评价对科学制定环境管理决策有着重要的意义.要对生态系统进行有效地管理,必须预测不利生态影响发生的可能性及后果,减小其对于生态系统或某些组分的损害程度.本文对生态风险评价的研究方法、工具以及研究趋势进行了综述,指出了目前生态风险评价中还需要进一步加强的研究领域,认为在当前城市化水平不断提高的情况下要关注城市生态风险,并针对存在的一些问题提出了今后的研究展望.     

城市化的生态风险及其管理

城市化体现在人口向城市聚集和城市景观扩张的同时,社会结构发生了极大变化,城市生产生活方式向更加广泛的地区扩散。然而,随着人口的过度密集和城市的日益扩张,交通拥堵、空气污染、废物堆积、流行病肆虐等\"城市病\"频发。城市通过大量汲取和消耗自然资源,向周围环境排放大量污染物,改变了区域生态系统的原有结构和功能,产生了严峻的生态风险,进而制约着城市生态系统的可持续发展。城市化的生态风险正逐步得到广泛关注,但对其具体的内涵和影响尚不明晰。归类描述了城市化过程中面临的各种生态风险,分析了导致生态风险的主要因素,阐述了辨识与评价生态风险的基本方法,提出了城市化生态风险的调控管理对策。     

城镇化过程生态风险评价案例研究

选择我国小城镇发展较为迅速的浙中地区（主要以巍山镇为例）采用变量相关的生态学方法,对其城镇化过程的生态风险评价作了尝试,结果表明,癌症和高血压等“文明病”的发病率随着城镇化水平的提高而逐年上升,具体表现为与城镇居住人口（包括农业人口和非农业人口）密度,居民人口增加,年龄,性别,乡镇工业和交通发展等有关,是城镇生态系统中有害物浓度和输入通量增加对人类生存与发展作用的结果,反映了城镇化过程中所遭受的生     

Ecology: The Science Versus the Myth

This paper describes the foundations of ecology as a science and argues for adherence to scientific principles in the environmental arena. Ecology as a science does not present moral or ethical guidance for societal use in environmental management. Moral, ethical, economic, and political values are integral parts of environmental management, but they are derived outside the realm of science. We emphasize the importance of preserving the power of science as a methodology to acquire objective information separated from societal values. Environmental Risk Assessment is a process that engages and requires both the life and social sciences for successful environmental management.     

Hormesis and ecological risk assessment: Fact or fantasy?

Hormesis is a widespread phenomenon across occurring many taxa and chemicals, and, at the single species level, issues regarding the application of hormesis to human health and ecological risk assessment are similar. However, interpreting the significance of hormesis for even a single species in an ecological risk assessment can be complicated by competition with other species, predation effects, etc. In addition, ecological risk assessments may involve communities of hundreds or thousands of species as well as a range of ecological processes. Applying hormetic adjustments to threshold effect levels for chemicals derived from sensitivity distributions for a large number of species is impractical. For ecological risks, chemical stressors are frequently of lessor concern than physical stressors (e.g., habitat alteration) or biological stressors (e.g., introduced species), but the relevance of hormesis to non‐chemical stressors is unclear. Although ecological theories such as the intermediate disturbance hypothesis offer some intriguing similarities between chemical hormesis and hormetic‐like responses resulting from physical disturbances, mechanistic explanations are lacking. While further exploration of the relevance of hormesis to ecological risk assessment is desirable, it is unlikely that hormesis is a critical factor in most ecological risk assessments, given the magnitude of other uncertainties inherent in the process.     

The Concept of Data Utility in Health Risk Assessment: A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective

Human and ecological health risk assessments and the decisions that stem from them require the acquisition and analysis of data. In agencies that are responsible for health risk decision-making, data (and/or opinions/judgments) are obtained from sources such as scientific literature, analytical and process measurements, expert elicitation, inspection findings, and public and private research institutions. Although the particulars of conducting health risk assessments of given disciplines may be dramatically different, a common concern is the subjective nature of judging data utility. Often risk assessors are limited to available data that may not be completely appropriate to address the question being asked. Data utility refers to the ability of available data to support a risk-based decision for a particular risk assessment. This article familiarizes the audience with the concept of data utility and is intended to raise the awareness of data collectors (e.g., researchers), risk assessors, and risk managers to data utility issues in health risk assessments so data collection and use will be improved. In order to emphasize the cross-cutting nature of data utility, the discussion has not been organized into a classical partitioning of risk assessment concerns as being either human health- or ecological health-oriented, as per the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund Program.     

Uncertainty Is Part of Making Decisions

Advances in computer technology and applied statistics have provided the opportunity for the non-statistician to investigate uncertainty in a quantitative manner. The following discussion argues, notwithstanding the possible misuse of uncertainty analysis, that uncertainty is always present and that decisions based on human or ecological risk assessment would benefit from disclosure of uncertainty in the estimated risks.