Understanding the Impact of Chemical Pollutants on Freshwater Ecosystem Services

This project addresses a key challenge in chemicals regulation and environmental protection: ensuring that society can benefit from chemicals, whilst protecting ecosystems from their adverse impacts. Freshwater ecosystems provide multiple benefits to people (i.e. ecosystem services, ES), but the biodiversity on which they depend is under threat. Internationally, freshwater species are going extinct more rapidly than terrestrial or marine species and pollution is a major threat.

Environmental Quality Standards (EQSs) used to protect freshwater ecosystems from the adverse impacts of chemical pollutants, use toxicity data generated from single-species toxicity tests. The EQS is driven by the most sensitive species and does not reflect the importance of their role in ecosystem processes, which can have dramatic impacts on how ecosystems function. The links between EQSs, biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and hence ES are therefore uncertain.

This project offers a novel approach to review exemplar chemical pollutants with respect to levels which would have impacts on different ecosystem services. This will require identifying relevant traits present in major taxonomic groups (or service providing units). Part of the novelty is involving stakeholders to identify key ecosystem services, which are important to them (such as water purification or recreation related).

The vision is that the student could develop new approaches to chemical standard setting that would identify concentration levels protective of different valuable ecosystem services. The student will use existing prospective toxicity data and retrospective environmental monitoring data to assess the relative sensitivity of ES providers and develop ES-based EQSs.

The student has the opportunity to influence future chemical standard setting in the UK and potentially influence the worldwide management of chemicals.