Detecting Ecological Impacts Caused by Human Activities

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the detection of ecological impacts caused by human activities. It considers the approaches that can isolate effects of particular activities from nonhuman sources of natural variation as well as background variation, caused by other anthropogenic events. Such approaches reduce the uncertainty that underlies the documentation of effects of anthropogenic impacts. It focuses on the field assessment of localized impacts that potentially affect ecological systems with two major views: the field assessments are absolutely essential to understanding human impacts because they complement and provide field tests of predictions provided by risk assessment, and that the improved sampling designs are critical to improving the quality and utility of results obtained from field assessments. Uncertainty in predictions from risk assessment models is acknowledged and is limited to two sources: uncertainty about the actual value of parameters that are estimated from the studies underlying the Risk Assessment model, and uncertainty about the environmental inputs to the model. Estimates of these sources of error are incorporated into a risk assessment analysis to estimate the uncertainty associated with the predictions of the model.