The scope of this Interest Group (IG) is mechanistic effect modeling for the risk assessment of chemicals in Europe. The IG will focus on models to analyze and predict effects of chemicals on organisms, populations, communities and ecosystems in aquatic, soil and terrestrial environments. The IG will consider models to describe and predict effects on the level of the single organism, e.g., toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic models (TK-TD), dynamic energy budget models (DEB), biotic ligand models (BLM). Empirical statistical models (e.g., dose-response functions, species sensitivity distributions, multivariate models of community structure) and QSARs are not included in the focus of the group.
The IG accommodates two Working Groups (WGs), working on specific issues:
*The 'Model Acceptability, version control and scenario Development' (MAD) WG aims to create a communication forum that allows exchange of information and critical discussions on the pathway to evaluate the acceptability of effect models for regulatory risk assessment of pesticides.
*The Lemna WG aims to provide a refined model description and implementation of the TK-TD growth model of Lemna sp., which can be used directly for higher tier assessments or serve as a reference for other implementations.