M1 PM State of the Science: Visions for the Future
Monday, 14 November 2005: 1:50 PM - 5:30 PM in Ballroom 1

(SUT-1117-821479) Ecological assessment in the next 25 years: trends and wishes.

Suter, G¹, ¹ U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Development, National Center for Environmental Assessment

ABSTRACT- Current trends in science, technology and governance will influence the development of ecological assessment practices in the coming years, perhaps in a revolutionary manner. First, the omics revolution, if it lives up to a fraction of its hype, will provide a new basis for predicting effects on organisms and for determining how organisms are being affected. This should lead to a greater integration of human health and ecological assessment as common tools for analyzing the responses of all organisms as systems of genes, proteins and metabolites are developed. If this promise of computational toxicology is fulfilled, organism-level toxicology could be effectively automated and ecological assessors will be focused on exposure and higher level effects. The second trend is in information science. We are using information in a very crude manner, individually hunting for facts and data in publications or in data bases that were created by extracting facts and data from publications. We are still coding models based on formulas in publications. We are performing assessments by cobbling together those facts, data, and models, frustrated by the interfaces and certain that we did not find the really pertinent publication and that better facts, data and models are out there somewhere. We need open source environmental science, models that download and play like iTunes, and assessment frameworks that integrate it all for you. Finally, trends in governance require better performance by everyone, including environmental scientists in industry and government. We will not continue to develop rigid assessment practices and force decision makers to accept the results. Rather, we will adapt the form as well as the content of assessments to the problems, the sites, and the decision makers. This is the Buck Rogers version of our future. We can make it happen.

Key words: risk assessment, genomics, information science, future