Volume 21, Issue 3, May 2025

Key points

• For a derived environmental quality standard (EQS) to be considered protective, it must be relevant to the specific exposure scenarios and ecosystems it is intended to protect; Haber’s Rule indicates that an EQS for continuous exposures should be lower than one derived to be protective of short, transient, exposures.

• The acute EQS (maximum allowable concentration, MAC) for nickel has not been derived using the scientifically recognized standard of bioavailability-based concepts nor using the most updated and relevant information, the appropriate guidance has not been followed, and implementation of the EQS has not been considered.

• Water chemistry conditions that are relatively insensitive to Ni exposures (e.g., low pH, high dissolved organic carbon and medium hardness) that meet the bioavailable annual average (AA) EQS, because they present low potential risks, may find themselves showing an exceedance when assessed against the MAC.

Key points

• Research in the Rabanal páramo has mainly focused on environmental assessment and planning, revealing a gap in understanding the benefits of ecosystem services and highlighting the need for further analysis on the impacts of conservation initiatives on páramo communities.

• Conservation projects in the Rabanal páramo should address power dynamics, politics, and community rights, promoting participatory and inclusive decision-making to enhance community well-being and ensure their active involvement in conservation efforts.

• The Rabanal páramo is an ecological treasure and a vital livelihood source for local farmers, whose traditional knowledge contributes to sustainable land management and biodiversity conservation.

• Recognizing the cultural ecosystem services linked to farmers' knowledge fosters local empowerment and resilience, helping preserve the páramo ecosystem and ensuring it continues to provide essential services to both local and broader populations.

1. Emerging contaminants research shows exponential growth, from <1,000 (2006) to ∼7,000 (2022) papers.

2. China and the USA lead in emerging contaminants research output and citations in global efforts.

3. Degradation, removal, and impacts of emerging contaminants reflect evolving research interests.

4. Future research includes interdisciplinary studies, advanced remediation, advanced methods.

Key points

• Bacterial biosorption is identified as an innovative, cost-effective, and sustainable technology for heavy metal removal, offering transformative solutions to mitigate water contamination crises exacerbated by climate change.

• Integrating nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and AI significantly enhances bacterial biosorption’s efficiency and specificity, paving the way for scalable industrial applications across critical sectors.

• Employing indigenous bacterial strains and interdisciplinary collaborations ensures ecological sustainability, promoting large-scale adoption and minimizing environmental disruptions.

• Bacterial biosorption bridges scientific innovation with global sustainability goals, addressing pressing environmental challenges while safeguarding ecosystems and public health.

Key points

• Literature about carrying capacity in human-occupied environments falls into three primary domains of concern: resources to survive, the human-built environment, and human well-being.

• Carrying capacity is rarely concerned with the survival of human communities and increasingly encompasses socioeconomic factors and quality of life considerations, reflecting concerns of social tolerance rather than physical limitations.

• Carrying capacity is invoked most often to evaluate and understand the relationship between human population growth, urbanization, and living standards. Connection of carrying capacity and resilience needs to be studied.

Key points

• Morphological spatial pattern analysis and Linkage Mapper were used to analyze Ningbo's ecological network, showing land use changes and source/corridor evolution from 2000–2020.

• The number of ecological corridors in Ningbo decreased and their distribution changed, weakening north–south source interaction.

• Optimization strategies enhanced the ecological network's connectivity by adding sources, restoring breakpoints, and constructing stepping stones.

• The study is significant for Ningbo's ecological protection but has limitations regarding corridor width and small-scale patches.

Key points

• This study investigated the socio-hydrological system for the sustainable management of agricultural water resources.

• Root cause analysis (RCA) was used to investigate the causes of the imbalance between water consumption and water resources.

• The community sensitivity component (1.34%) indicated that the co-evolution of water and humans in the studied basin is not fully understood and that network users are not concerned about water crisis and environmental degradation.

• Poor yield, low income of farmers, reduction of cultivated area, social instability, and lack of secondary agricultural jobs are the main reasons for mismanagement of water resources.

Key points

• The central forested areas of the watershed provide the highest levels of carbon sequestration, flood prevention, and habitat quality, demonstrating significant capacity for carbon absorption, runoff management, and wildlife support.

• The identification of 134 high-risk patches (12% of ecological sources) along forest edges highlights their vulnerability to land use changes, emphasizing the need for protection to mitigate edge effects, enhance biodiversity, and preserve ecological integrity.

• The resistance surface evaluation shows high resistance to species migration in the northern and southern regions, in addition to Pinchpoint Mapper results identifying the southern forest and rangeland as areas with the highest connectivity and ease of movement.

• This study uniquely applies the node removal method alongside the Habitat Risk Assessment approach to prioritize the most critical habitat patches, emphasizing the importance of considering disturbance impacts in achieving the resilience of the ecological network.

Key points

• Empirical correlations between the bioconcentration factor (BCF) and biomagnification factor (BMF) are of limited use for bioaccumulation assessment.

• Dietary bioaccumulation test results can be used for bioaccumulation screening.

• Proposal for using both the BMF and the BCF for assessing the bioaccumulation potential of substances in water-breathing organisms.

• The Absorption-Distribution-Metabolism-Excretion for Bioaccumulation (ADME-B) bioaccumulation assessment tool correctly identifies BCFs of substances in fish to be either < 5,000, or ≥ 5,000 for 88%–89% of bioaccumulation data investigated and for 96% of bioaccumulation data conservatively.

Key points>

• Aircraft and pavement deicers contribute to elevated biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) at Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport outfalls.

• Propylene glycol, a freezing point depressant used in aircraft deicers and anti-icers, was the compound that contributed most to elevated BOD and COD.

• The primary outfall, which drains the main terminal area, had the highest BOD and COD loads of sites measured, which included three outfalls, an infall, and the receiving stream.

Key points

• A toxicity index based on pesticide usage and toxicity data shows that pesticide hazard to honeybees (Apis mellifera) has changed substantially in U.S. maize (Zea mays) and soybean (Glycine max) production between 1998 and 2020.

• In maize, Coleoptera and Lepidoptera pests drive pesticide usage most responsible for hazard to honeybees, whereas in soybean, hemipteran pests were the largest relative contributor to insecticide honeybee hazard.

• Insecticides targeting relatively few pests represent an outsized proportion of the relative insecticide hazard to honeybees in maize and soybean.

• Efforts to reduce the need for pesticides to control these species would likely pay dividends in reducing nontarget risks to insects such as honeybees.

Key points

• The process of selecting a coagulant for water treatment is complex; however, hybrid coagulants have emerged as alternatives to traditional inorganic options but face challenges in adoption due to higher costs and limited use in the water industry.

• Because the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) allows structured decision-making in multicriteria contexts by considering both qualitative and quantitative factors, in this study, the AHP method was used to evaluate and rank the coagulants according to four criteria (technical, environmental, economic, and social).

• Inorganic coagulants like ferric chloride demonstrated superior performance in turbidity removal; however, hybrid coagulants showed potential for environmental sustainability due to reduced sludge production and biodegradability, making them viable alternatives for future applications.

• The study emphasizes the importance of the technical criterion, with the highest weight (56%) in coagulant selection, while noting that small changes in criteria weights can significantly affect rankings, highlighting the need for careful prioritization in water treatment decisions.

Key points

• NGOs and media organizations were the most influential hubs in pesticide-related discussions on Twitter/X, dominating the discourse with high engagement and follower-to-following ratios.

• Information dissemination was most effective through NGOs, academia, and individuals, while government accounts exhibited limited engagement and influence within the network.

• Retweets, news articles, and media posts were the primary sources of information, with less representation of scientific literature, highlighting a gap in the dissemination of credible research-based content.

• Public sentiment toward pesticide-related discussions was predominantly negative, with media and individual influencers facing the highest negative reception compared to other groups.

Key points

• The majority of the literature reviewed for population relevance assessment of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) used modeling approaches and applied them to fish (rather than field or monitoring studies, applied to terrestrial vertebrates).

• The approaches to population relevance assessment of EDCs in the literature were diverse, highlighting the need for a consistent method for application in a regulatory context.

• We provide an approach to perform a population relevance assessment of EDCs that may be used in a regulatory context, identifying seven key points that need to be addressed in this process.

• We consider our approach against four case studies from the literature to provide an illustration of how such a population relevance assessment for EDCs may be performed.

Key points

• The revised EFSA 2023 Guidance Document on the risk assessment of plant protection products for birds and mammals emphasizes vulnerability as a relevant criterion for focal species selection rather than prevalence, but provides unsatisfactory guidance on how this should be implemented.

• Here, we investigate an approach that uses the frequency of occurrence in surveys from focal species studies for daily dietary dose calculations to rank species according to their vulnerability to exposure and select the most vulnerable species as focal species.

• Based on 10 case examples covering different species and crops, the suitability of the proposed approach was shown.

• The most relevant focal species resulting from the new ranking approach are not significantly different from the focal species selection according to the methodology in EFSA 2009; only in a few cases, additional species were identified as potential focal species and require further considerattion.

Key points

• Differences in the use of SimpleTreat were observed across three organizations resulting in inconsistent wastewater removal efficiency predictions.

• Different approaches to the use of SimpleTreat result in variations in the input parameters used, such as Log K_ow, vapor pressure, and biodegradation rate constant.

• Ten chemicals were selected, and wastewater removal rate predictions were calculated in SimpleTreat using the three different approaches to observe the impacts on the calculated removal efficiency.

• A unified approach to running SimpleTreat is proposed to ensure consistent and reproducible wastewater treatment plant removal efficiency estimates across organizations.

Key points

• There was a shift in species composition after drilling, with no granivorous or omnivorous species observed foraging.

• There was higher seed exposure in field borders compared to field centers.

• Low overall seed availability was potentially due to intensive seedbed preparation.

• Fields offer limited food sources for granivorous bird species.

Key points

• Yellowstone cutthroat trout are less sensitive to selenium based on survival and reproductive effects relative to egg selenium concentrations than other cutthroat trout species and brown trout.

• The EC₁₀ values for survival and abnormalities were surprisingly similar based on log logistic three-parameter dose-response modeling.

• The baseline level of abnormalities is not zero (i.e., 100% normal) as this assumption overestimates effects thresholds by reducing the pool of individuals to only those that are 100% normal, negating that low-level minor deformities occur naturally and must be considered.

• Reanalysis of the YCT egg to whole-body conversion factor indicates a value of 1.43 is more appropriate than the USEPA recommended value of 1.96 for Oncorhynchus.

Key points

• Soybean production in Madhya Pradesh significantly impacts the environment, with global warming potential (GWP) and land use emissions as major concerns.

• Residue burning raises GWP to 210.80 kg CO₂ eq. ha⁻¹, while leaving residue on the field results in a lower, yet notable, GWP of 19.78 kg CO₂ eq. ha⁻¹.

• Fuel combustion in agricultural machinery and soil nutrient applications are primary contributors to environmental impacts in soybean cultivation.

• Sustainable practices are essential to balance soybean’s agricultural benefits with environmental sustainability, focusing on reducing fossil resource use and improving residue management.

Key points

• Working hours, discrimination or favoritism, sexual harassment, and corruption are the most social hotspots in gold mining in Mali.

• Gold mining still has a bad reputation in public opinion due to the environmental and socioeconomic challenges it poses in Mali.

• In Mali, two main types of mining are practiced throughout the country: artisanal and industrial gold mining.

• It is very difficult to compare the results of different social life cycle assessment studies due to the diversity of objectives, impact categories, and assessment methods.