R7 AM Soil Ecotoxicology and Risk Assessment
Thursday, 17 November 2005: 8:00 AM - 11:40 AM in 327-329

(SEM-1117-548407) Integration of bioavailability, ecological and ecotoxicological lines-of-evidence into ecological risk indexes for contaminated soil assessment.

Semenzin, E^{1, 2}, Critto, A¹, Carlon, C², Mesman, M³, Schouten, A³, Rutgers, M³, Giove, S⁴, Marcomini, A¹, ¹ Interdepartmental Centre IDEAS - Ca' Foscari University, Venice, Italy² Consorzio Venezia Ricerche, Marghera, Venice, Italy³ Laboratory for Ecological Risk Assessment, National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, RIVM, Bilthoven, The Netherlands⁴ Department of Applied Mathematics, Ca' Foscari University, Venice, Italy

ABSTRACT- According to the Weight of Evidence (Burton et al., 2002) and the TRIAD (RIVM, 2000) approaches, combining the information provided by the Lines of Evidence (LoEs) belonging to three investigation legs (chemistry/bioavailability, ecology and ecotoxicology), a site-specific Ecological Risk Assessment framework was defined, including three tires of investigation. Specific methodologies and tools were developed in order to select the most suitable LoEs to be applied to the case study and to integrate their results. A comparison procedure, based on Multi Criteria Analysis (MCA) and expert judgment, provided a comparison of 62 bioavailability tools, 21 ecological observations and 40 ecotoxicological tests. The obtained ranks supported the selection of the most suitable set of tests to be applied to the ACNA di Cengio contaminated mega-site (Italy), for each investigation tier. Moreover, for the integration of the LoEs results, a specific Weight of Evidence procedure was defined aiming at assessing the impairment occurring on the terrestrial ecosystem due to soil contamination. Specific integrated risk indexes and an evaluation matrix were developed in order to support the quantitative and qualitative impairment analysis for selected terrestrial ecosystem function and soil biodiversity. Due to the complexity of the procedures (including expert judgments, comparative and weighting criteria, chemical, ecological and ecotoxicological knowledge of the soil system), MCA methods have been included in order to handle different sources of information and avoid their loss. The proposed methodology has been implemented in the ERA-MANIA DSS, a decision support system preliminarily applied to the ACNA site (Italy); additional applications could be useful to test the system in different conditions.

Key words: Site-specific Ecological Risk Assessment, Contaminated sites, Integrated index, Decision Support System