Open Conference

The CREAM Open Conference took place in the Leipziger KUBUS – The UFZ conference venue, Leipzig, Germany, from June 10-13, 2013.

The CREAM Open Conference provided members from academia, regulators, and industry the unique opportunity to discuss the potential of mechanistic effect models for ecological risk assessment of chemicals. The conference provided an overview of the achievements made within the CREAM project. Additionally, we invited oral papers and poster presentations addressing mechanistic effect models, i.e. ecological and individual-level effect models. Topics addressed included:

  • Extrapolation: How can we extrapolate from individual to population, from small scales to larger scales, from species to species, and from certain environmental settings to different ones?
  • Recovery: How does population recovery depend on toxicity and ecological factors such as life-history characteristics, species traits, population structure, density dependence, timing of exposure, and landscape structure?
  • Linking Exposure and Effect models: How do spatial and temporal variability of exposure translate into effects at the individual and population level?
  • Sublethal effects: What is the relative importance of lethal versus sublethal effects for controlling the population- (and community) level impacts of chemicals in the field?
  • Model complexity: What level of model complexity is needed for different types of risk assessment questions?
  • Good Modelling Practice: How should models be documented to become acceptable in regulatory risk assessments? What kind of tests should be included to prove that a model is a sufficiently good representation of its real counterpart?

–> Program