Project properties
Title Ecological risk assessment of chemicals by cross-species extrapolation approaches
Group Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management Group
Project type thesis
Credits 24-39
Supervisor(s) Sanne van den Berg (Sanne1.vandenBerg@wur.nl)
Paul van den Brink (Paul.vandenBrink@wur.nl)
Examiner(s) Paul van den Brink
Contact info Contact persons for this topic:
Sanne van den Berg (Sanne1.vandenBerg@wur.nl) or Paul van den Brink (Paul.vandenBrink@wur.nl)
General info on thesis: Edwin Peeters (edwin.peeters@wur.nl)
Begin date 2021/07/10
End date 2021/12/31
Description Ecosystems are usually populated by many species. Each of these species carries the potential to show a different sensitivity towards all of the numerous different chemical compounds that can be present in their environment. Since the experimentally testing of all possible species-chemical combinations is impossible, the ecological risk assessment of chemicals largely depends on cross-species extrapolation approaches. Together with the desire to reduce the testing of vertebrates like fish this thesis subject aims to develop models to predict the sensitivity of fish species to certain chemicals using historical sensitivity data on the one hand and species’ taxonomic relatedness, phylogeny and traits (like size and lipid content) as predictors. Regarding which predictors are useful for explaining differences in species sensitivity, we will employ interspecies-correlation, relatedness-based, traits-based, and genomic-based extrapolation methods, focussing on the amount of mechanistic information the predictors contain, the amount of input data the models require, and the extent to which the different methods are able to provide protection for ecological entities like fish species.
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