4. DSS-ERAMANIA: A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR SITE-SPECIFIC ECOLOGICAL RISK ASSESSMENT OF CONTAMINATED SITES

摘要

The increasing demand for the assessment and management of contaminated land requires the development of new and effective tools for use in the site-specific Ecological Risk Assessment (ERA) procedure. For this purpose we propose the DSS-ERAMANIA, a decision support system (DSS) that aims at implementing the whole ERA procedure and supporting the expert/decision maker (DM) in its assessment. It was developed according to a Triad approach, where the results provided by a set of measurement endpoints are gathered and compared to support the assessment and evaluation of ecosystem impairment (I.e., assessment endpoint) caused by the stressor(s) of concern. In particular, in the Triad approach, the measurement endpoints refer to three Lines of Evidence (LoEs): environmental chemistry, ecotoxicology, and ecology. The rationale is that by integrating the three different LoEs the uncertainty in the risk estimation will be pragmatically reduced. For the DSS, a framework including three subsequent investigation levels (I.e., tiers) was proposed, that enables the completion of the risk assessment once the provided answer is unequivocal and characterized by a relatively small uncertainty.