Are current tissue-based selenium guidelines and criteria overly protective of freshwater fish populations? A critical review with recommendations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Several decades after selenium impacts on wild fish populations were observed in freshwater reservoirs receiving fly ash effluents from electric power facilities at Belews Lake and Hyco Reservoir (North Carolina, USA), developments in selenium (Se) toxicology have led to a greater understanding of Se effects on freshwater fish. These latter advancements have allowed regulatory agencies in several jurisdictions to develop tissue-based toxicity benchmarks for the protection of aquatic life. These benchmarks were generally derived from datasets encompassing multiple fish species and designed to protect the most sensitive species (US Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] water quality criteria). Safety factors have been applied in the development of some Canadian guidelines (British Columbia [BC]), resulting in guidelines that appear to be overly conservative. The present study addresses the question, “Are current tissue-based selenium guidelines and criteria overly protective of freshwater fish populations?” A literature review was conducted of studies in which Se was the primary constituent of concern, to compare tissue concentrations and results of fish population metrics and deformity assessment studies with current regulatory thresholds for the protection of aquatic life in the United States and Canada. EPA fish tissue-based Se criteria were found to be protective of fish populations and, at times, overly protective. Canadian water quality guidelines for Se (BC Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy [BCMOECCS], Environment and Climate Change Canada [ECCC]) were consistently found to be overly protective, especially for benchmarks in which safety factors were used to derive those guidelines. In addition to a synthesis of the results of these studies, various limitations of the reviewed studies are discussed, and recommendations for future studies are proposed. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2022;18:622–630. © 2021 SETAC KEY POINTS Critical evaluation of tissue-based selenium guidelines in Canada and USA against field research finds environmental regulations are protective of fish, and overly conservative in some cases. Fish tissue samples several orders of magnitude in exceedance of USEPA, Canadian, and BC guidelines and criteria were found to have no population-level impacts on freshwater fish. The use of safety factors in establishing environmental benchmarks produces overly conservative benchmark values.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".