The UGent Environmental Toxicology Research Group aims to advance the understanding of ecotoxicological problems at different levels of biological organisation, in order to improve environmentally relevant ecological risk assessment and support sustainable development.

With our research we aim to address the ‘extrapolation problems’ - in the aquatic environment sensu lato - one encounters when assessing ecological risk based on results from laboratory bioassays with single species. The bulk of the available bioassays typically consider effects of aqueous exposure of single data-rich stressors on one generation of one well-characterized species in a standardized test medium. In reality, however, subsequent generations of field populations are exposed via various uptake routes to complex mixtures of multiple (emerging and thus data-scarce) stressors, potentially exerting (toxic) stress constrained by their bioavailability in the natural water body. Unlike the organisms used in laboratory tests, exposed individuals may have different genetic architecture even when belonging to the same species. Lastly, species do not live in isolation, as is the case in single-species toxicity bioassays, but take part in natural food webs to sustain ecosystem functions and services.

News

The research group Environmental Toxicology will be presenting its research at the SETAC Europe 22nd Annual Meeting / 6th SETAC World Congress in Berlin from 20-24 May 2012 in several poster sessions and platform presentations. Find out where and when we will be presenting.