Verdonck F A M, Janssen C R, Jaworska J, Vanrolleghem P A
Department of Applied Mathematics, Biometrics and Process Control (BIOMATH), Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, B-9000 Gent, Belgium.
Water Sci Technol. 2003;48(3):39-46.
The characterisation of the risk of (new) chemicals to species/communities, when both the exposure/environmental concentration and effects (species sensitivity) are variable and uncertain, is the central issue in Probabilistic Environmental Risk Assessment. The spatial variability is one of the largest components of the total variability. This paper tries to explicitly account for this spatial variability by geo-referencing the exposure, effect and finally probabilistic risk. Geo-referencing makes the risk assessment more refined and realistic. In addition, it is also highlighted that geo-referencing the effects of chemicals (species sensitivity distribution) is still a large unexplored area but has large potential to improve probabilistic ecological risk assessments.
