Example Insectivorous Birds Exposure to Pesticide

Consider the following purely hypothetical example assessment for the exposure of an insectivorous bird to a new agricultural insecticide. This insecticide degrades very quickly after application, so that its toxicity dissipates after 24 hours. It does not bioaccumulate, and nonlethal doses are metabolized with no long-term consequences for the bird. These features imply a fairly simple assessment, involving the following expression for computing exposure of a bird to the insecticide within 1 day of its field application 

Application of Uncertainty Analysis to Ecological Risk of Pesticides 

Less is known about the distribution for food intake rate. One study reported in the literature suggests that the mean for daily consumption by this species in this region was 5.23 g insect tissue per day, with variance of 2.3 g. The published report suggested that these statistics were based on many observations, but it did not give any of the raw data or other information about the distribution. To model the 

FIGURE 6.14 Input p -boxes for the example assessment of bird exposure to insecticide. 

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