Protection Goals and Assessment Endpoints

One of the early definitions of ecotoxicology was the testing of more than one organism in a toxicity test at one time (modified from [4]) however, this refers to toxicity in 

Once protection goals have been chosen, the selection of appropriate entities to protect in the environment (assessment endpoints) is important in assessing risk. Poorly selected assessment endpoints have resulted in more failures in the risk assessment process than any other possible errors in the process [14]. Assessment endpoints are explicit expressions of the actual valued ecosystem components (organisms, populations, or communities) or ecosystem functions that are to be 

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