Summary of a Workshop on Ecological Risk Assessment and Military-Related Compounds: Current Research Needs

More than 21,000 contaminated sites have been identified on Department of Defense (DoD) installations. The scope of this environmental problem is obvious whether one considers the nature and extent of contamination or the amount of resources required to evaluate and/or clean up such a large number of sites. Under most circumstances, decisions regarding the need for and the scope of any cleanup action will be driven by environmental risk assessment. As required by Federal regulation, such assessments must address the potential risk to human health and the environment posed by the contaminants present at any particular site. Over the last 20 years, methods for performing human health risk assessments have developed, matured, and been incorporated into well established Federal guidance used within various Federal programs and agencies, Compensation and Liability Act or Superfund. Greater public concern recent years has been focused on more general environmental problems resulting from the presence of contaminants in the environment. However, the issues involved in making a determination about the broader ecological consequences of contaminant exposure are more complex than those related to human health risk. This fact is most simply illustrated by considering that human heath risk assessments need only focus on the risk to one receptor, humans; whereas, an ecological risk assessment must potentially consider the risk to hundreds of interacting species located at any particular site. This disparity in the complexity involved in human and ecological assessments of risk is further emphasized by the fact that for ecological risk assessments, the number and kinds of receptors vary considerably from site to site.