Calibrating Predicted Mixture Toxic Pressure to Observed Biodiversity Loss in Aquatic Ecosystems.

ABSTRACT: Unlike practices in applied ecology, assessing the impact of chemical pollution on biodiversity depends on species sensitivity data from laboratory toxicity effect tests. There are ~12,000 chemicals with such data, enabling quantification of a metric that characterizes the magnitude of the toxic pressure of chemical mixtures on aquatic organisms. However, the calibration between this lab-based metric and biodiversity effects in the field is lacking. To address this gap, we calibrated both. We quantified mixture toxic pressure levels from extensive water quality monitoring data across 1286 sampling sites and expressed it as multi-substance potentially affected fraction of species (msPAF). We furthermore quantified species abundance and richness loss for those sites. Calibration of both yiel

SUBMITTER: Oginah SA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12175039 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature