A Review of Ecological Risk Assessment on Multiple Levels

As the major part of environmental risk assessment, ecological risk assessment (ERA) provides tools or frameworks for ecological analysis and thus serves environmental risk management and decision-making. Different agencies have proposed ERA schemes and models to meet their particular regulatory needs. Although these issues are critical, they only focus on a single aspect and provide less of a paradigm for practical ecological assessments. In this paper, an overview is particularly made on primary methods for ecological risk assessment on population, ecosystem, landscape and regional scales for the reference of researchers to select appropriate assessment endpoint and models in their study. Existing problems are discussed for current ecological risk assessment and practices, and perspectives are given in the paper.