Environmental Risk Assessment and Management from a Landscape Perspective (Kapustka/Environmental Risk) || Linking Regional and Local Risk Assessment

✍ Scribed by Kapustka, Lawrence A.; Landis, Wayne G.

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 862 KB
• Edition: 1
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 0470089970
• DOI: 10.1002/9780470593028.ch7

✦ Synopsis

Physical or biological processes that affect the fluxes of organisms or stressors can functionally define regions, such as wide-scale watersheds or physiographic provinces (Hunsaker et al. 1990). Stressors, sources, and their associated risks exist along a continuum of spatial scales, and it is impossible to draw an objective line between what is a regional and what is a local environmental situation. For instance, regional change can be caused either by a local phenomenon (stressor source or primary effect) that has a regional consequence or by multiple local sources that, when combined, create changes that qualify as regional or by diffuse sources-very many, very small. Despite the lack of a clear demarcation between local and regional, we distinguish two categories (i.e., regional and local) of ecological risk assessment (EcoRA), acknowledging that this is an arbitrary categorization that provides a practical way to distinguish local and regional risk assessment methods.

Local risk assessments cover, for example, evaluation of changes in the water quality of a reach of a particular river related to discharges from one or many specific industries. The scale in this case is small and the organisms are exposed in the area. In general, risk assessments at a small scale can comprise more refined analyses than assessments made at a regional scale. On the other end of the scale, a regional risk assessment is more general and coarse-grained. Details are left out in order to aggregate information, sometimes in order to prioritize where more detailed assessment, on a local scale, should be performed.