Sediment Toxicity Testing of Organic Chemicals in the Context of Prospective Risk Assessment: A Review

Abstract

Sediment toxicity tests play an important role in prospective risk assessment for organic chemicals. This review describes sediment toxicity tests for microorganisms, macrophytes, benthic invertebrates, and benthic communities. Current approaches in sediment toxicity testing are fragmentary and diverse. This hampers the translation of single-species test results between freshwater, estuarine and marine ecosystems and to the population and community levels. A more representative selection of species and endpoints as well as a unification of dose metrics and exposure assessment methodologies across groups of test species, constitutes a first step toward a balanced strategy for sediment toxicity testing of single organic compounds in the context of prospective risk assessment.

Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology for the supplemental material.

KEY WORDS:

• benthic community
• benthic invertebrates
• macrophytes
• microorganisms
• prospective sediment toxicity testing

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors would like to thank Anneke Rippen and Ivo Roessink for their help in collecting papers on marine invertebrates and micro- and mesocoms, respectively. Thanks to Malyka Galay-Burgos, Mick Hamer, Stuart Marshall, Walter Schmitt, Kathleen Stewart, and Paul Thomas for their critical look at the review and fruitful discussions. This project is funded by CEFIC, the Long Range Research Initiative (LRI).