Understanding the Impact of Chemical Pollutants on Freshwater Ecosystem Services

This project addresses a key challenge in chemicals regulation and environmental protection, which is ensuring that society can benefit from chemicals, whilst protecting ecosystems from chemical impacts. Freshwater ecosystems provide multiple benefits to people through the delivery of ecosystem services (e.g. food production, nutrient cycling, waste treatment/removal), but the biodiversity on which they depend is under threat. Internationally, freshwater species are going extinct more rapidly than terrestrial or marine species and chemical pollution is a major threat. Environmental Quality Standards (EQSs) used to protect freshwater ecosystems from the adverse impacts of chemical pollutants, use toxicity data generated from single-species toxicity tests. The EQS is driven by the most sensitive species and does not reflect the importance of their role in ecosystem processes. The links between EQSs, biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and ecosystem services are therefore uncertain. This project offers a novel approach to determine EQSs for chemical pollutants for assuring the protection of different ecosystem services. This will require identifying relevant traits present in major taxonomic groups (or service providing units). Part of the novelty is involving stakeholders to identify key ecosystem services, which are important to them. The vision is that the student could develop new approaches to chemical standard setting that would identify water concentrations that are protective of different valuable ecosystem services. The student will use existing prospective toxicity data and retrospective environmental monitoring data to assess the relative sensitivity of ecosystem service providers and develop appropriate EQSs. The student has the opportunity to influence future chemical standard setting in the UK and potentially further afield.