The ECOTOXicology Knowledgebase: A Curated Database of Ecologically Relevant Toxicity Tests to Support Environmental Research and Risk Assessment
Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 2022
The need for assembled existing and new toxicity data has accelerated as the amount of chemicals ... more The need for assembled existing and new toxicity data has accelerated as the amount of chemicals introduced into commerce continues to grow and regulatory mandates require safety assessments for a greater number of chemicals. To address this evolving need, the ECOTOXicology Knowledgebase (ECOTOX) was developed starting in the 1980s and is currently the world's largest compilation of curated ecotoxicity data, providing support for assessments of chemical safety and ecological research through systematic and transparent literature review procedures. The recently released version of the Knowledgebase (ECOTOX V5, www.epa.gov/ecotox) provides single chemical ecotoxicity data for over 12,000 chemicals and ecological species with over one million test results from over 50,000 references. Presented here is an overview of ECOTOX, detailing the literature review and data curation processes within the context of current systematic review practices, and discussing how recent updates improve the accessibility and reusability of data to support the assessment, management, and research of environmental chemicals. Relevant and acceptable toxicity results are identified from studies in the scientific literature, with pertinent methodological details and results extracted following well-established controlled vocabularies and newly extracted toxicity data added quarterly to the public website. Release of ECOTOX V5 included an entirely re-designed user interface with enhanced data queries and retrieval options, visualizations to aid in data exploration, customizable outputs for export and use in external applications, and interoperability with chemical and toxicity databases and tools. ECOTOX is a reliable source of curated ecological toxicity data for chemical assessments and research, and continues to evolve with accessible and transparent state-of-the-art practices in literature data curation and increased interoperability to other relevant resources. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. © 2022 SETAC.
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