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4. Moving from the lab to the landscape: Extending the role of ecology in risk assessment (TU4/4) Developing spatial approaches to predicting aquatic community occurrence across the agricultural landscape. Hendley, Paul1, Gonzalez-Valero, Juan1, Maund, Steve2, Liess, Matthius 2, Von de Ohe, Peter2, Holmes, Chris 3, Ball, Maria3, Schaefers, Christoph4, Hommen, Udo4, Biggs, Jeremy 5, 1 Syngenta Crop Protection Inc., Greensboro, NC, USA, USA2 Syngenta Crop Protection Inc., Basel, Switzerland, Switzerland3 Center for Environmental Research, Leipzig-Halle, Germany, Germany4 Waterborne Environmental Inc., Leesburg, VA, USA, USA5 Fraunhofer-Institute for Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology, Schmallenberg, Germany, Germany ABSTRACT- Refined approaches for aquatic ecological risk assessments for pesticides have been designed recently by groups such as ECOFRAM and FOCUS. Spatially distributed exposure estimation based on the agricultural landscape is a useful higher tier refinement but, to better understand the likelihood of ecological risk, spatially varying exposures must be combined with spatial information on the communities likely to be exposed. An international cooperative project has drawn together several scientists and key data for the Braunschweig region of Lower Saxony to develop approaches for predicting the spatial variation of community structure based on agricultural landscape, land use and water body morphology factors. The team has been developing approaches for comparing and combining ecological and landscape data of different levels of complexity, investigating spatial and other correlations within and between datasets and for visualizing the findings. Detailed results from refined field measurements, GIS visualization and estimation of morphological, land use and anthropogenic metrics combined with TWINSPAN and discriminant analysis of invertebrate data indicate exciting potential to be discussed in this and related presentations. These techniques lead to more focused pesticide risk assessment associated with new options for mitigating risk and managing agricultural landscapes. Cooperative action on an international level is necessary to develop unified datasets to permit general application of the approach. Key words: Spatial, Risk, Community, Landscape |
