Valery E. Forbes, Amlie Shmolke, Chiara Accolla, and Volker Grimm authored the above-captioned article, which was published in the Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. It reads in part as follows:

“Ecological risk assessments (ERAs) are moving toward using populations and ecosystem services as explicit protection goals, and impacts on these goals are difficult, if not impossible, to measure empirically. Mechanistic effect models are recognized as necessary tools for ERA that complement empirical data (National Research Council 2013; European Food Safety Authority 2014), but we need a strategy to make them consistent, transparent, and reproducible following principles similar to those used to develop standardized experimental designs for empirical tests, while recognizing that the models should be allowed to evolve as understanding, data availability, and ERA questions change over time.

Read the full post