ecological assessment Articles

In recent years, ecological risk assessment (ERA) has emerged as an important part of environmental protection programs. The following discussion provides a brief overview of ERA issues. What is ecological risk assessment? Ecological risk assessment is the practice of determining the nature and likelihood of effects of our actions on animals, plants, and the environment. ...

Jan. 1, 2004

By Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC)

Ecosystem services are defined as the outputs of ecological processes that contribute to human welfare or have the potential to do so in the future. Those outputs include food and drinking water, clean air and water, and pollinated crops. The need to protect the services provided by natural systems has been recognized previously, but ecosystem services have not been formally incorporated into ...

Sep. 2, 2015

By John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The REBECCA project focuses on establishing quantitative relationships between physicochemical and hydromorphological pressures and biological indicators. One of the major applications of such relationships is to support the establishment of WFD compliant assessment and classification methods. All EU Member States are required to establish such methods for the different biological quality ...

Jan. 1, 2007

Jun. 17, 2014

By John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Dec. 27, 2012

By John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Carbon sequestration in urban ecosystems is becoming an international climate change initiative for sustainable development. Drawing upon field work undertaken in the author's native Shenyang, China, this research reports upon the natural process of carbon sequestration from the atmosphere into urban ecosystems. The risks associated within carbon sequestration in urban ecosystems are investigated ...

Jun. 10, 2013

By Inderscience Publishers

Oct. 10, 2013

By John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The ecological responses of diatoms to pollution and nutrient enrichment, caused by domestic and municipal sewage, in the five fresh water ponds have been examined. It was observed that diatoms were completely absent in P3 and some species were also absent in P1 and P2. Similarly, diatom diversity was lower in P1 and P2 than in P4 and P5. However, diatom abundance was higher in P4. The Biological ...

Apr. 19, 2010

By Inderscience Publishers

Evaluating organism exposure in the ecosystems is a difficult task and can be carried out measuring or predicting concentrations in the environment. While current regulatory approaches favour a modelling approach, they either use a static representation of the environment and of the chemical discharge or a simplified dynamic approach (e.g. dealing with pesticides). Improving the ecological ...

Apr. 22, 2013

By John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Changes to sources, stressors, habitats, and geographic ranges; toxicological effects; end points; and uncertainty estimation require significant changes in the implementation of ecological risk assessment (ERA). Because of the lack of analog systems and circumstances in historically studied sites, there is a likelihood of type III error. As a first step, the authors propose a decision key to ...

Nov. 12, 2012

By John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The present investigation is an attempt at assessing the ecological sustainability of one of the most popular technologies for pyrometallurgical copper production, namely Outokumpu's flash smelting method. The real operating installation in Umicore-Pirdop, Bulgaria has served as a model flowchart. The assessment has been made using the exergy method of thermodynamic analysis. The exergy of ...

Nov. 15, 2004

By Inderscience Publishers

Contaminated sites in the U.S. undergo remediation and restoration through regulatory programs that lead the two processes through independent but often parallel pathways with different objectives. The objective of remediation is to reduce risk to human health and the environment, whereas that of restoration is to restore injured resources and compensate the public for lost use of the services ...

Oct. 7, 2015

By John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Oxides of nitrogen and oxides of sulfur are two of six principal (or “criteria”) pollutants for which EPA has established national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS). The Clean Air Act requires EPA to periodically review the scientific basis for these standards by preparing an Integrated Science Assessment (ISA), formerly called an Air Quality Criteria Document (AQCD). The previous AQCDs for ...

Dec. 1, 2008

By US EPA - Environmental Protection Agency

Currently, there is a common perception that the discharge of contaminated groundwater to a surfacewater body does not pose an ecological risk if contaminant concentrations in surface-water samples are below analytical detection limits or at very low concentrations. The transition zone represents a unique and important ecosystem that exists between surface-water and the underlying ground-water, ...

Jul. 1, 2008

By US EPA - Environmental Protection Agency

The development and application of products containing engineered nanoparticles (ENP) has dramatically increased over the past decade, whereas the assessment of potential hazards to humans and especially to the environment substantially falls behind. The UFT Centre for Environmental Research and Sustainable Technology at the University of Bremen focuses on environmentally benign nanomaterials. ...

Jun. 6, 2014

By Inderscience Publishers

The manuscript is the Foreword of the Special Series on “New Challenges in ERA”, of which I am Guest Editor, highlighting the need for a substantial improvement for the future of ERA. It explains the reasons in support of the scientific interest of the Special Series and describes very shortly the main topics treated in the different papers. Integr Environ Assess Manag © 2013 SETAC ...

Apr. 9, 2013

By John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The article “The ecological risk assessment of atrazine in North American surface waters” [1] is one of the few among the 100 most cited articles in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry to specifically address risk and/or assessment of risk, and it was the first to use probabilistic approaches for a pesticide. As with all science, it was one of many steps in the refinement of procedures for ...

Nov. 13, 2012

By John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

With various disadvantages of pollution control technologies for toxic metal-contaminated soil, we mixed contaminated soil with sludge for in situ composting to stabilize toxic metals, so plants are enriched to take up the toxic metals. When simulating the above, we added toxic metal solution into sewage sludge, and then composed it with steel slag to determine inhibition of the availability ...

Jul. 22, 2015

By IWA Publishing

A site‐specific ecological risk assessment (ERA) was conducted to examine the simultaneous use of genetically modified corn (Bt corn) with a neonicotinoid seed coating, clothianidin, and use of a granular insecticide, tefluthrin, to protect crops from pest damage. A field study was conducted on‐site and exposure data from the literature was summarized to determine the matrices and exposure ...

Dec. 30, 2014

By John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Ecological risk assessment as currently practiced has hindered consideration of ecosystem services endpoints and restoration goals in the environmental management process. Practitioners have created barriers between procedures to clean up contaminated areas and efforts to restore ecosystem functions. In this article, we examine linkages between contaminant risk assessment approaches and ...

Sep. 15, 2015

By John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.