Absent ecology in the terrestrial ecological risk assessment process and an absent need for assessment

Abstract While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ecological risk assessment process was devised with the best of intentions, including fashioning it to be isomorphic with the human health risk assessment process, longtime existing biological information demonstrating ecological receptors to be irrelevant for evaluation, was evidently overlooked. Owing to the spatial dynamics of density and home range, birds and mammals as the only terrestrial species routinely evaluated, occur in numbers far too small to legitimize their inclusion in assessments. These receptors would also not be expected to sufficiently contact contaminated media, principally soil, to trigger the development of concerning toxicological effects. The ecotoxicological manifestation of brief lifespans constitutes yet another reality not considered in applied ecological risk assessment. The decades-old nature of sites obviates any need for assessment; were toxicological effects to be elicited, they would have necessarily already arisen, yet they have consistently failed to appear. The analysis presented argues that in the haste to develop an ecological assessment process, the interplay of contaminated sites being relatively small, and species of seeming interest traveling over relatively vast spaces, has been ignored. The data assembled and reviewed demonstrate Superfund-type sites to house insufficient ecological resources to warrant a risk assessment process altogether.