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Improving Estimates of Pesticide/Chemical Effects on Avian Reproduction Success
Project Summary
The EPA is working to improve methods to determine if the proposed use of a pesticide (and other chemicals) will adversely affect wildlife populations. To address this question it is necessary to determine the pesticide’s impacts on demographic parameters such as survival and reproduction rates. Laboratory toxicity tests provide information on the concentrations of a pesticide that lead to adverse effects, but the information is not in a currency that directly relates to changes in survival and reproduction rates of wild populations. This research project is developing a modeling framework that integrates available toxicity data with information on species life history and timing of pesticide applications, to estimate the effects on avian reproductive success throughout the breeding season in the currency needed for population-level risk assessments. The modeling framework is very flexible for estimating effects across a variety of species with varying quality of life history information available from the literature. It also can be modified to include additional toxicity data and life information as needed. Because of the large uncertainties inherent in predicting demographic processes, risk assessors and managers also need to be able to assess the precision with which such predications are made, so that they can be confident that regulatory decisions are still protective of populations of concern. An important part of this research project is providing guidance and approaches for interpreting the uncertainty in model outputs.
Key products
Etterson, M.A., R.S. Bennett, E.L. Kershner, and J.W. Walk. A unified approach to modeling avian seasonal fecundity. Ecological Applications. in review.
Etterson, M.A. and L. Nagy. 2008. Is mean squared error a consistent indicator of model accuracy? An analytical case study in spatially structured demography. Ecological Modelling 211:202-208.
Bennett, R.S. and M.A. Etterson. 2007. Incorporating results of avian toxicity tests into a model of annual reproductive success. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management 3(4):498-507.
Etterson, M.A., L. Nagy, and T. Robinson. 2007. Partitioning risk among different causes of nest failure. The Auk 124(2):432-443.
Etterson, M.A., B. Olsen, and R. Greenberg. 2007. The analysis of covariates in multi-fate Markov chain nest failure models. Studies in Avian Biology 34:55-64.
Bennett, R.S. and M.A. Etterson. 2006. Estimating pesticide effects on fecundity rates of wild birds using current laboratory reproduction tests. Human and Ecological Risk Assessment 12(4):762-781.
Etterson, M.A. and R.S. Bennett. 2006. The effects of uncertainty about age at transition on bias in the Mayfield family of estimators. Ecological Modelling 199:253-260.
Etterson, M.A. and R.S. Bennett. 2006. On the use of published demographic data for population-level risk assessment in birds. Human and Ecological Risk Assessment 12(6):1074-1093.
Etterson, M.A. and R.S. Bennett. 2005. Including transition probabilities in nest survival estimation: A Mayfield Markov Chain. Ecology 86(6):1414-1421.Project personnel
| Name | Phone | |
| Richard Bennett | bennett.rick@epa.gov | 218-529-5212 |
| Matthew Etterson | etterson.matthew@epa.gov | 218-529-5158 |
Research project update date
April 17, 2008