On the relevance of microecosystems for risk assessment: some considerations for environmental toxicology.
Microecosystems (any multispecies system with at least two trophic levels and its abiotic surroundings, (partly) enclosed by artificial boundaries for the purpose of research) differ from natural ecosystems by reason of enclosure and scale. Their application to environmental toxicology has been of interest where fate and behavior of contaminants markedly modify the exposure of biota to them and hence the environmental hazard. Evaluation of literature data, both from a scientific and a regulatory point of view, indicates that a standardized microecosystem design is unlikely to contribute to environmental hazard rating if it were to replace currently used test schedules. On the other hand, microecosystems may be applied usefully for the evaluation of ambient environmental quality criteria, provided that the design is suitable for replicable long-term continuous exposure experiments. Also, they provide a possible means to appraise the validity of bench tests for the assessment of real-world hazards.
D004463:Ecology; D004777:Environment; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012306:Risk; D014116:Toxicology