Pollution Impact Network Model for Evaluating Contaminant Effects on Wildlife Population Health

Abstract

Exposure of pollutant in Wildlife species: not isolated single events rarely one pollution event at the a single step, but it is travelling throughout food webs, through multiple organism’s age range, interacting with the presence of additional stressors before causing damage at the organism and then at the population health; Many of published studies on contaminant impact to wildlife consider isolated toxicity tests to animals for evaluating population-level impacts with focus on a given wildlife species and specific toxicity endpoint, but lack the connections how individual animal’s exposures, and environmental contaminations for that case, correlate along entire populations network. In the present article, the authors of the Pollution Impact Network Model: A Conceptual Framework for Wildlife Population Contaminant Assessment discuss for the first time how wildlife population responses to contamination, considering interactions between environmental contaminants and wildlife using 4 layers: occurrence of environmental contaminants, diet and internal uptake of the contaminations, organism level response (behavior and biology) to and finally how such influences on wildlife population. The conceptual model utilizes concepts of recent advanced modeling tools for risk evaluation of wildlife Eco toxification, spatiotemporal behavior of the relationship between pollution and wildlife population, techniques managing multiple stressing agents’ cumulative risks, behavior measurement estimations, assessment of traceability of metal risk values, and evaluation of chemical agents' effects.