Recently, environmental scientists have been required to perform a new type of assessment-ecological risk assessment. This is the first book that explains how to perform ecological risk assessments and gives assessors access to the full range of useful data, models, and conceptual approaches they need to perform an accurate assessment. It explains how ecological risk assessment relates to more familiar types of assessments. It also shows how to organize and conduct an ecological risk assessment, including defining the source, selecting endpoints, describing the relevant features of the receiving environment, estimating exposure, estimating effects, characterizing the risks, and interacting with the risk manager. Specific technical topics include finding and selecting toxicity data; statistical and mathematical models of effects on organisms, populations, and ecosystems; estimation of chemical fate parameters; modeling of chemical transport and fate; estimation of chemical uptake by organisms; and estimation, propagation, and presentation of uncertainty. Ecological Risk Assessment also covers conventional risk assessments, risk assessments for existing contamination, large scale problems, exotic organisms, and risk assessments based on environmental monitoring. Environmental assessors at regulatory agencies, consulting firms, industry, and government labs need this book for its approaches and methods for ecological risk assessment. Professors in ecology and other environmental sciences will find the book's practical preparation useful for classroom instruction. Environmental toxicologists and chemists will appreciate the discussion of the utility for risk assessment of particular toxicity tests and chemical determinations.

The Concise Encyclopedia of Environmental Systems provides a concise overview of the current state of the art in the study of environmental systems. Contains specially commissioned articles and updated and revised articles from the acclaimed Systems & Control Encyclopedia. The subjects covered include: agricultural systems; atmospheric processes and air quality; ecosystems; environmental chemistry; geology, soil processes and geophysics; hydrology, fluid dynamics and water quality; marine processes; meteorology; and climatology. In addition, many of the articles cover the methodological procedures used in environmental systems analysis, with contributions on automatic control and management; computers in modelling and management; environmental planning; environmetric methods, including time-series analysis; mathematical modelling, including data-based, physically based and simulation modelling; remote sensing and image processing; uncertainty in environmental systems; and sensitivity analysis. The encyclopedia is extensively cross-referenced on two levels - to articles of direct relevance as well as to other articles which will provide the reader with more general background information.

The International Society for Ecological Modelling (ISEM) sponsors conferences, workshops and training courses with the aim of advancing the development of ecological and environmental modelling. The 3rd International Conference on the state-of-the-art in ecological modelling was sponsored by the ISEM in cooperation with the National Park Service Water Resources Laboratory and hosted by the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. Its theme was the application of ecological modelling to environmental management and this book contains the full texts of the three invited papers presented in the five general sessions, plus the final summaries and syntheses of the topics covered during those sessions.