Using Relative Risk to Compare the Effects of Aquatic Stressors at a Regional Scale |
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Authors: | John Van Sickle John L Stoddard Steven G Paulsen Anthony R Olsen |
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Institution: | (1) National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory, Western Ecology Division, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 200 SW 35th Street, Corvallis, Oregon 97333, USA |
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Abstract: | The regional-scale importance of an aquatic stressor depends both on its regional extent (i.e., how widespread it is) and
on the severity of its effects in ecosystems where it is found. Sample surveys, such as those developed by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency’s Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP), are designed to estimate and compare the extents,
throughout a large region, of elevated conditions for various aquatic stressors. In this article, we propose relative risk
as a complementary measure of the severity of each stressor’s effect on a response variable that characterizes aquatic ecological
condition. Specifically, relative risk measures the strength of association between stressor and response variables that can
be classified as either “good” (i.e., reference) or “poor” (i.e., different from reference). We present formulae for estimating
relative risk and its confidence interval, adapted for the unequal sample inclusion probabilities employed in EMAP surveys.
For a recent EMAP survey of streams in five Mid-Atlantic states, we estimated the relative extents of eight stressors as well
as their relative risks to aquatic macroinvertebrate assemblages, with assemblage condition measured by an index of biotic
integrity (IBI). For example, a measure of excess sedimentation had a relative risk of 1.60 for macroinvertebrate IBI, with
the meaning that poor IBI conditions were 1.6 times more likely to be found in streams having poor conditions of sedimentation
than in streams having good sedimentation conditions. We show how stressor extent and relative risk estimates, viewed together,
offer a compact and comprehensive assessment of the relative importances of multiple stressors. |
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Keywords: | Relative survey Environmental stressor EMAP Stream monitoring Sample survey |
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