Translating ecological risk to ecosystem service loss

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science
• Ecological Risk Assessment
• Natural Resource Management

Background:

• Hazardous site management involves environmental remediation and natural resource restoration.
• Ecological Risk Assessment (ERA) informs remediation, while Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) guides restoration and compensation.
• ERA and NRDA processes, despite shared data needs, often operate independently.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate methods for translating natural resource injuries into ecological service losses.
• To propose enhancements for utilizing ERA data within the NRDA process.
• To improve the linkage between ERA and NRDA for more effective hazardous site management.

Main Methods:

• Analyzing the technical underpinnings of translating natural resource injuries to ecological service losses.
• Examining ways to improve ERA data collection and interpretation for NRDA.
• Highlighting methods for aggregating service losses across different contaminants and natural resources.

Main Results:

• Proposing the focus of ecological assessment endpoints on ecosystem services relevant to restoration and compensation.
• Recommending ERA measurements on species directly impacting ecosystem services and at higher biological levels.
• Suggesting the use of continuous variable response descriptions and biodiversity measures as key ERA endpoints.

Conclusions:

• Closer integration of ERA and NRDA enhances environmental decision-making.
• Standardized ecosystem service assessment endpoints can benefit hazardous site investigations.
• Collaborative data quality objective processes improve data collection and analysis for both ERA and NRDA.