Hanna Schuster will be chairing a session at SETAC Seville in May 2024 on the topic of ‘How can we put the ‘eco’ back into ecotoxicology as part of plant protection products risk assessment?’.
Other co-chairs will be Arnd Weyers (Bayer AG), Alexander Feckler (University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU)), and Mascha Rubach (Ctgb).
The session outline can be found below:
The traditional tiered risk assessment approach for chemicals tends to rely primarily on the toxicity of a substance to test species and worst-case exposure assumptions. Therefore, the complexities of the real world are not reflected. The integration of in-depth understanding of natural systems and processes has the potential to more accurately capture how organisms will be exposed and under what circumstances, and thus the likely effects that will occur. This could lead to a significant improvement to risk assessment practices and in achieving protection goals.
Whilst measuring adverse toxicological effects is essential to deriving protective risk assessment endpoints, the real-world potential for exposure is often not fully captured. A more holistic approach to risk assessment should also incorporate research into, and a better understanding of, the ecological and behavioural aspects of animals that may be considered at risk of exposure. Some areas of plant protection products (PPPs) risk assessment already go someway to doing this; for example, bird and mammal risk assessments can be refined by gathering data on the proportion of time an individual spends feeding in a treated crop, and thus the proportion of time it may be exposed to treated food items.
In this session we are seeking examples either from specific organism groups (e.g. birds, mammals, bees) or ecosystems (e.g. soil, aquatic) to demonstrate how a holistic approach can benefit risk assessment practices and progress our understanding of the interaction of PPPs and species in the environment. Submissions can range from ecological and behavioural studies to modelling or physiological investigations, from single species up to landscape scale studies. In line with this year’s focus on integrating science and policy for environmental challenges, we are keen to attract submissions that investigate how to incorporate such fundamental understanding of organisms, populations, and ecosystems into protective, but more realistic, regulatory risk assessment frameworks.
We encourage everyone who is active in the realms of PPP wildlife risk assessment to submit abstracts. You can submit your abstracts on the SETAC website within the abstract submission portal.
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