Biological monitoring: Essential foundation for ecological risk assessment

“Risk-based decision making” has become an often-heard buzzword in Congress and government agency circles. The idea implies that policies based on scientific risk assessment—of human health or ecological risks—will be realistic, fair, and cost effective. But for policies developed through risk-based decision making to fulfill this promise, the foundations and endpoints for risk assessment must be properly conceived and relevant for sustaining critical societal needs. Environments in which living systems cannot sustain themselves cannot support human affairs. We therefore argue that the first, most important step for ecological risk assessment is to set biological endpoints; further, each step in ecological risk assessment should be informed by data from biological monitoring. The measurement endpoints (what is measured) and the assessment endpoints (the ecological goods and services society seeks to protect) must be explicitly biological. Ecological risk assessment will miss its mark if it relies on inappropriate surrogates—such as chemical measures assumed to reflect the health of a biota—or if it is only a veneer, a simple substitution of ecological terminology in another pollution-control or human health risk assessment process.