Ecotoxicological

Ecotoxicology is the study of the toxic effects of chemical substances on ecosystems. It integrates toxicology with ecology to understand how pollutants affect organisms, populations, communities, and their environment. The field considers not only direct lethality but also sublethal effects, such as altered reproduction, behavior, growth, and ecosystem processes like predation and competition.

Researchers use laboratory and field approaches, including standardized bioassays with organisms such as fish, daphnids, algae, and plants, to determine dose–response relationships, expressed as LC50, EC50, or NOEC values. They evaluate exposure routes—water, sediment, soil, air—and temporal scales, distinguishing acute and chronic effects. Biomarkers and omics methods are used to detect physiological stress. Ecotoxicology also studies fate and transport, bioaccumulation, biomagnification, and trophic transfer.

Applications include environmental risk assessment for chemicals, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and industrial byproducts. Ecotoxicology informs regulatory decisions, remediation strategies, and environmental monitoring. It supports frameworks that compare predicted environmental concentrations with effect concentrations to establish hazard quotients and safety limits.

Challenges include mixture toxicity, site-specific variables, climate change interactions, and the extrapolation from laboratory species to diverse ecosystems. Ongoing research seeks to improve predictive models, integrate ecological realism, and address long-term and sublethal effects in multicompartment systems. The term ecotoxicological is used as an adjective to describe methods, assessments, or findings related to ecotoxicology.