TY - JOUR
T1 - Predicting impacts of chemicals from organisms to ecosystem service delivery
T2 - A case study of insecticide impacts on a freshwater lake
AU - Galic, Nika
AU - Salice, Chris J.
AU - Birnir, Bjorn
AU - Bruins, Randall J.F.
AU - Ducrot, Virginie
AU - Jager, Henriette I.
AU - Kanarek, Andrew
AU - Pastorok, Robert
AU - Rebarber, Richard
AU - Thorbek, Pernille
AU - Forbes, Valery E.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019
PY - 2019/9/10
Y1 - 2019/9/10
N2 - Assessing and managing risks of anthropogenic activities to ecological systems is necessary to ensure sustained delivery of ecosystem services for future generations. Ecological models provide a means of quantitatively linking measured risk assessment endpoints with protection goals, by integrating potential chemical effects with species life history, ecological interactions, environmental drivers and other potential stressors. Here we demonstrate how an ecosystem modeling approach can be used to quantify insecticide-induced impacts on ecosystem services provided by a lake from toxicity data for organism-level endpoints. We used a publicly available aquatic ecosystem model AQUATOX that integrates environmental fate of chemicals and their impacts on food webs in aquatic environments. By simulating a range of exposure patterns, we illustrated how exposure to a hypothetical insecticide could affect aquatic species populations (e.g., recreational fish abundance) and environmental properties (e.g., water clarity) that would in turn affect delivery of ecosystem services. Different results were observed for different species of fish, thus the decision to manage the use of the insecticide for ecosystem services derived by anglers depends upon the favored species of fish. In our hypothetical shallow reservoir, water clarity was mostly driven by changes in food web dynamics, specifically the presence of zooplankton. In contrast to the complex response by fishing value, water clarity increased with reduced insecticide use, which produced a monotonic increase in value by waders and swimmers. Our study clearly showed the importance of considering nonlinear ecosystem feedbacks where the presence of insecticide changed the modeled food-web dynamics in unexpected ways. Our study highlights one of the main advantages of using ecological models for risk assessment, namely the ability to generalize to meaningful levels of organization and to facilitate quantitative comparisons among alternative scenarios and associated trade-offs among them while explicitly accounting for different groups of beneficiaries.
AB - Assessing and managing risks of anthropogenic activities to ecological systems is necessary to ensure sustained delivery of ecosystem services for future generations. Ecological models provide a means of quantitatively linking measured risk assessment endpoints with protection goals, by integrating potential chemical effects with species life history, ecological interactions, environmental drivers and other potential stressors. Here we demonstrate how an ecosystem modeling approach can be used to quantify insecticide-induced impacts on ecosystem services provided by a lake from toxicity data for organism-level endpoints. We used a publicly available aquatic ecosystem model AQUATOX that integrates environmental fate of chemicals and their impacts on food webs in aquatic environments. By simulating a range of exposure patterns, we illustrated how exposure to a hypothetical insecticide could affect aquatic species populations (e.g., recreational fish abundance) and environmental properties (e.g., water clarity) that would in turn affect delivery of ecosystem services. Different results were observed for different species of fish, thus the decision to manage the use of the insecticide for ecosystem services derived by anglers depends upon the favored species of fish. In our hypothetical shallow reservoir, water clarity was mostly driven by changes in food web dynamics, specifically the presence of zooplankton. In contrast to the complex response by fishing value, water clarity increased with reduced insecticide use, which produced a monotonic increase in value by waders and swimmers. Our study clearly showed the importance of considering nonlinear ecosystem feedbacks where the presence of insecticide changed the modeled food-web dynamics in unexpected ways. Our study highlights one of the main advantages of using ecological models for risk assessment, namely the ability to generalize to meaningful levels of organization and to facilitate quantitative comparisons among alternative scenarios and associated trade-offs among them while explicitly accounting for different groups of beneficiaries.
KW - Aquatic ecosystem model
KW - Ecological risk assessment
KW - Ecological valuation
KW - Ecosystem services
KW - Fishers
KW - Swimmers
KW - Trophic cascade
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UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85065927662&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.05.187
DO - 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.05.187
M3 - Article
C2 - 31128362
AN - SCOPUS:85065927662
SN - 0048-9697
VL - 682
SP - 426
EP - 436
JO - Science of the Total Environment
JF - Science of the Total Environment
ER -