SCIRIC - a major source for advice on communication

It is done! As of May 3rd, 2015, SETAC Europe, the European professional organisation for environmental toxicology and chemistry, has a group of experts officially formed to advise on proper environmental science and risk communication. This so called „Advisory Group on Science and Risk Communication (SCIRIC)“ will in future work on strengthening communication from within the SETAC community to all different target groups including the general public.
As the leading author of the proposal that restulted in the establishment of this group I am now chairing an initial steering committee to bring the group to live. This committee consists of several colleagues with strong interest for and expertise in science and risk communication, who are all very eager to develop this topic as an integral part of environmental research within SETAC.

In a nutshell, SCIRIC aims to become one of the major sources for advice on science and risk communication for SETAC members and maybe even beyond.

The working programme of the group is ambitious and challenging, but also very promising as a huge step forward into a future of better science and risk communication of environmental issues as a pre-requisite for a stronger public awareness of our research, findings and goals. We will basically base our activities on two pillars: the people and the topic.

For the „people part“ we aim at forming an interdisciplinary and international network of SETAC members with experience and/or expertise in communicating research. This measure already started back in 2012 with the first session at the Berlin conference and is ongoing until today with the sessions in Glasgow, Basel and latest Barcelona. In parallel we are increasing the number of submissions to the focused article series in ESEU. As a first outcome we seek to provide to the SETAC members a list of experts to consult in terms of questions regarding any kind of science and risk communication.

The „topic part“ has as a goal to fully understand environmental research as a topic for science and risk communication, through strictly analysing the properties, characteristics, and particularities of this topic with respect to communicating research findings. This analysis includes a complete list of target groups with a similar characterisation; a record of the connection between these target groups and environmental sciences, be it professional views, rational considerations, or rather emotional expectations, fears and desires; a full summary of the possible or imagniable findings, results and opinions to communicate; a list of the goals and desired impact of environmental scientists when communication their research.

Upon knowing the people and understanding the topic we will be able to develop taylor-made tools and strategies for proper science and risk communication of environmental research, set up trainings, workshops, and conferences, further advance the knowledge, and by that reach a high level of communication from within SETAC as well as maintain this quality.

This will tremendously increase societal and (by that) political impact of SETAC, thus leading to higher environmental quality and better human health.


As a nice side effect I designed another logo.

SOLUTIONS post on the freshwaterblog

The SOLUTIONS project held its annual general assembly from 13 to 16 October in Delft, The Netherlands. It was a very valuable event with the cosy atmosphere of a family meeting.

We tried to capture this feeling in a blog post for the freshwaterblog, which is run by one of our partner projects - called MARS.

I enjoyed being responsible for the first draft, and hence the overall structure of the text. It is based on a personal-general scheme, for which I collected quotations from project members. This was fun, especially because I chose a slightly cybernetical approach asking my interview partners about their role in and expectations for SOLUTIONS - sometimes quite a challenge for scientists in times when the main reason for projects seems to be fundraising.

Appears to have been a good excercise for everyone. The blog post can be accessed here.

What we propose from what we learned

We were invited by Peter Chapman to write a so called Learned Discourse (LD) for the SETAC journal Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management (IEAM). LDs are described as "timely scientific opinions" and give authors the opportunity to communicate their thoughts on a specific topic. Peter is editor for LDs in IEAM. He asked us to write an LD about the Basel session, but we extended the theme to an overall review of our science communication activities. From that we derived "Three propositions for improved science communication from environmental research".

Cooperation for an effect-based investigation of municipal waste waters

Its not happening often that ecotoxicologists are asked by a municipality to investigate their sewage waters. The City of Stolberg together with Wasserverband Eifel-Rur (WVER) did, and we agreed to give 10 samples from their sewage water system a thorough ecotoxicological look, including influents and effluents from the waste water treatment plant Stolberg-Steinfurt.

This small but very interesting project will be covered by the master's thesis of candidate Sarah Johann. We will apply a range of different bioassays to reveal any possible hazardous potential.
Stolberg is a city near Aachen and an industrial hotspot of the region. While they have extensive data on heavy metal concentrations from continuous monitoring, so far no in-depth investigation of organic contamination has been done. Our bioassays are very well suited and sensitive enough to detect such substances through their biological activity.

Any positive results we will gain do not necessarily indicate a problem at all. Concentrations traceable using bioassays are often well below any environmentally or even toxicologically relevant level. Also, we do not expect any severe findings. This is a completely unbiased study, driven by scientific curiosity.

The City of Stolberg and the WVER are just very strict regarding environmental and human safety. They do so much for quality assurance when it comes to their waste waters, they now also want to cover this aspect. For us the project is a fantastic opportunity to get access to well-defined, specific waste water samples from different, very interesting spots, to better understand distribution of contaminants along the sewage water flow, and to prove bioassays as valuable tools for waste water monitoring.

Water to the power of 3 - Quality, Security and Management

The W3-Hydro project ("Water Quality Event Detection for Urban Water Security and Urban Water Management Based on Hydrotoxicological Investigations") is a BMBF-funded collaboration between RWTH Aachen University and the Technion in Haifa, Israel, within the Joint German-Israeli Water Technology Research Program. The project is coordinated by the Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Water Resources Management (IWW) under the lead of Prof. Holger Schüttrumpf.

We aim at an early event detection, identification and management of unforeseen, negative and sudden events for drinking water supply using hydrological in combination with ecotoxicological experimental investigations, together with water management and modelling.

Our part is (a) to develop an early warning system that automatically triggers sampling and further testing based on biotest systems, and (b) to investigate contaminant behaviour in the water-sediment-system for better understanding of substance transport and distribution.

We already built a custom-made low-cost pipetting robot for the automatic sampling, and started with the development of a flow-through device for behaviour monitoring of zebrafish larvae.

Futher info on the project can be found at http://w3hydro.org/

And again, I could enjoy designing a logo.

PAHs from coals are ecotoxicologically active

In continuation of the PAHs-from-coals-story, Wiebke Meyer published additional data and findings on the toxic potential of PAHs deriving from different coal types in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

The article titled "Polar polycyclic aromatic compounds from different coal types show varying mutagenic potential, EROD induction and bioavailability depending on coal rank" reports on mutagenicity and dioxin-like activity of coal-derived PAHs. Wiebke found that the toxic properties differ between coal types, and also some are better available to organisms than others, thus might more likely cause adverse effects.

Constant dosing: reliable exposure concepts to reduce "animal" use

Passive dosing is an approach were the partitioning equilibrium of a substance between a solid and a liquid phase is utilised to maintain exposure concentrations in biotesting. This means that test organisms are exposed at defined and constant concentrations, thus reducing experimental variability and uncertainty, which leads to more robust results.

Together with Philipp Mayer and Kilian E.C. Smith, both formerly of NERI in Roskilde, Denmark, and now with Technical University of Denmark and KIST Europe, respectively, we put out a paper "PAH toxicity at aqueous solubility in the fish embryo test with Danio rerio using passive dosing" in Chemosphere reporting on the usage of PDMS cast into glass vials for passive dosing of non-hatched zebrafish embryos (FET biotest). We show for 10 PAHs constant delivery from the PDMS reservoir to the water phase based on equilibrium partitioning, and prove passive dosing applicable in FET. This test design could in future lead to better data and hence reduced use of zebrafish embryos, albeit legally fish larvae up to 120 hours post fertilization are not considered animals. But we are biologists, we care about any organism.