Systematic analysis of freshwater metal toxicity with WHAM-F TOX

We used the WHAM chemical speciation model and the WHAM-F toxicity model to analyse the published results of laboratory toxicity experiments covering 52 different freshwater biological test species and 24 different metals, a total of 2037 determinations of EC with accompanying data on solution composition. The key extracted parameter was α , the parameter in WHAM-F that characterises the toxic potency of a metal on the basis of its estimated metabolically active body burden. For 16 data sets applying to metal-test species pairs with appreciable variations in solution composition, values of EC back-calculated from averaged values of α showed significantly (p