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FRTR Presenter: next presentation Jason Spiker risk assessment basics for ecological concerns with emphasis on pfas.

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FRTR Presenter: And according to his

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FRTR Presenter: wonderful bio, huh!

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FRTR Presenter: I'm not gonna read the whole thing. You started out. In fact, we'll talk about it. Okay, we started out in math back what? 2025 years ago? Yeah. Yeah. And and after a while you got tired of that and went went corporate right.

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FRTR Presenter: all right. So he worked for

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FRTR Presenter: electrical utility holding company

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FRTR Presenter: project manager right of some sort. Lots of sites, Eastern States mid Atlantic States.

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FRTR Presenter: I'm not even reading it now, and at some

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FRTR Presenter: point you saw the wisdom of

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FRTR Presenter: working for the navy.

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FRTR Presenter: and came back to work for the navy. And now what do you got it?

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FRTR Presenter: Title of subject matter expert

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FRTR Presenter: for the Navac Atlantic

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FRTR Presenter: in the field of risk assessment. I need glasses, sediment, assessment, cleanup

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FRTR Presenter: pfas, investigation, remediation. That's a lot.

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FRTR Presenter: Yeah. And you do a lot of sort of Bstcp work.

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FRTR Presenter: Is that about it? Okay, so.

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FRTR Presenter: Jason.

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FRTR Presenter: thank you for that.

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FRTR Presenter: yeah. Right? So this is part this presentation is actually part of the Navy's remedial innovative technology seminar that was put on earlier this year. We Jason Condor, who's the presentation after me? We're kind of like a tag team. Duo. I'm like his

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FRTR Presenter: opening act, and then he brings all the content especially in this case, for pfas.

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FRTR Presenter: So Carla Harry, who's from Exwick, and and they manage our writz. She asked me back

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FRTR Presenter: in June, in Norfolk if I would present here, and ironically, I presented here 2 years ago, but not on risk assessment, but on groundwater remediation technologies that the Navy is working on. So it's a lot of diverse kind of things. When I come here, apparently.

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FRTR Presenter: I have to give a general disclaimer.

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FRTR Presenter: basically, it says that the Navy will disown me for my own personal comments and views. But in reality I have to give this every time I present outside the Navy. It's 1 of our rules, basically saying that my views are my own when I give my opinions, and that's about it.

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FRTR Presenter: Ken went over this, but I will say, you know, one of the things I'll bring up later is, I was when I was very young, and it's actually gonna be 2020 years ago. Next year

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FRTR Presenter: is, I was on the steering committee for the EPA's Eco Ssl. Effort, which is going to be 20 years old. Next year the report was actually published, and for a young person in the navy being surrounded by all the ecological risk, assessment experts from Dod, from EPA, from the private sector at the time

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FRTR Presenter: was a real enlightening and very informative

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FRTR Presenter: development for me in my profession. So it's 1 of the things I'm actually proud of that I was actually a part of something that was developed by multiple federal agencies and and consulting and it was done on a consensus basis just wasn't done in a box.

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FRTR Presenter: So to give a little bit of present overview of my presentation show of hands here, like Jason and I always like to know our audience. How many people actually have a background in ecological risk assessment?

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FRTR Presenter: That's that's normally. When we gave the writs, that's about the right number, I would say there was 2 in the room. Jason, if you're on the phone, so maybe people on the phone are raising their hands

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FRTR Presenter: are on Zoom are raising their hands, too. There's 2 on the. So there's not a lot of people. That's why it's good. I'm giving this primer. I'm gonna give a Eco. 101 refresher, not really specific to pfas, but I'll give some anecdotes here and there.

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FRTR Presenter: The thing that I did add to this presentation I want to get through the era. One on one very quickly is the the pondering questions, and then some of my closing thoughts that are more efas specific.

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FRTR Presenter: The Navy's ecological risk assessment guidance essentially mirrors superfund rags. Well, rags erags for short

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FRTR Presenter: and and and it gets its basis from the the Dirt Manual and the Nerp Manual which which stands for

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FRTR Presenter: defense environmental restoration programs.

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FRTR Presenter: manuals and the the Navy policy was issued in 1999, shortly after the Eregs guidance was issued by EPA and in in reality we did this in development. We did the development in coordination with some folks from EPA.

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FRTR Presenter: The only thing that it does is it kind of breaks things down in a more simplistic manner, and it calls out what's called the refinement step. At the beginning of the baseline ecological risk assessment, which is known as Step 3. A.

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FRTR Presenter: So

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FRTR Presenter: quoting exactly from EPA. An era is a process that evaluates the likelihood of an adverse ecological effects. If they're occurring, or may occur as a result of exposure to one or more stressors.

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FRTR Presenter: mirroring basically what Linda said earlier. But except for human health.

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FRTR Presenter: the eras are often part of that Ri process that seeks to answer the questions of our chemicals at a particular site, causing adverse

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FRTR Presenter: ecological effects to ecological resources. Are they affecting the community? The population through reproductive effects, through growth effects. Usually we take into account. We don't. Survival is one thing, but growth and reproduction are the prime endpoints that we look at in ecological risk. Assessment.

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FRTR Presenter: Should action be taken to address those effects.

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FRTR Presenter: and what should be done, where, how, and when, essentially, to dig or not to dig, and in some cases, when it comes to sediment, it might not be to dig or not to dig, it might be to contain or amend, to adjust the bioavailability of certain contaminants.

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FRTR Presenter: The guiding principles of ecological risk assessment have their stem way back into the 15 hundreds with Paracelsius. The dose makes the poison, and I'm not going to go through each one of these.

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FRTR Presenter: But my favorite here is obviously gun suitors. Don't do anything stupid, and that can have a different meaning to everybody in the room.

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FRTR Presenter: To me it means that your screening level, ecological risk assessment or your refinement might identify that there's a potential ecological risk.

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FRTR Presenter: But the habitat that you're investigating couldn't take in nature a thousand years to develop

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FRTR Presenter: so digging that ecological habitat up

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FRTR Presenter: for the sake of what might be a model potential risk

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FRTR Presenter: could be destroying something that man's never going to be able to create, recreate. So that's don't do anything stupid.

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FRTR Presenter: This is a overview of the EPA's 8 step process in the e-rags.

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FRTR Presenter: obviously, you can look this up becoming your own master if you want, but I wouldn't advise it. It's it's for the people that you pay

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FRTR Presenter: to do the ecological risk assessment. Make sure that they know this.

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FRTR Presenter: The steps, one and 2 here are considered part of the screening level. Ecological risk. Assessment steps 3 through 7 are considered the baseline ecological risk, assessment and step 8 is the risk management, and that's usually taken apart in the Fs or the feasibility study in the overall circle of process.

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FRTR Presenter: I want to call out the scientific management decision points in this process. Because that's really what you consider the off ramps to the ecological risk assessment process. You know, after step 2, you want to decide.

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FRTR Presenter: Is there definitely the potential for unacceptable risk at my site. And if not, I'm taking the off ramp. I will say that doesn't happen too often, based on the conservatism that's built into the screening level risk assessment. It errs on the side of not concluding the false negative.

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FRTR Presenter: The Navy's era era policy and process is very similar, except it breaks it down into tiers. Tier. One is that screening level risk assessment tier 2

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FRTR Presenter: is the baseline risk assessment consisting of that steps 3 through 7 and tier 3 is essentially the Fs. Or step 8. The only thing that I'd like to call out here, that's not really called out directly in erags is the step 3, a refinement. And this is basically before you go out there. And you start collecting a lot of your biological

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FRTR Presenter: media doing toxicity, testing you really refine some of those initial conservative assumptions that are used in your screening level risk assessment to determine. Yes, we need to absolutely go to that, Barra.

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FRTR Presenter: Basically, it's just a different framing of the steps, including in Eregs.

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FRTR Presenter: And now this is a very similar slide that you saw with Linda earlier, except on the far side. Instead of having hazard identify identification she had planning.

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FRTR Presenter: There's 4 basic scientific parts to any risk assessment. And that's hazard identification, exposure, assessment, dose response and risk characterization. And whether you're assessing pfas, pahs.

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FRTR Presenter: dioxins or metals.

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FRTR Presenter: the same framework works

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FRTR Presenter: in the tier, one screening we we tried to determine do we need an era? And a lot of people talked about this morning where pfas releases might have occurred, so you might have a hanger

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FRTR Presenter: that doesn't exactly have an exposure pathway to soil. It's all paved.

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FRTR Presenter: There's no ecological habitat.

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FRTR Presenter: But then, as some other folks this morning. I think.

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FRTR Presenter: Janet, hit on this earlier.

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FRTR Presenter: There might be pathways that your groundwater actually moves, and Dennis also hit on this, that it moves, and now you might have a groundwater plume that comes up in a stream or a lake that might be a quarter of a mile a mile downstream, where now you have an ecological exposure from that same release. So you might not have a soil exposure. But you still might need to do an ecological risk assessment from that secondary exposure.

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FRTR Presenter: What receptors are there, and and how are they exposed? Are they exposed to sediment, groundwater soil

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FRTR Presenter: which chemicals in this case today, we're really focusing on pfas. But in a traditional sense, when we go out to sites, we look at all the potential chemicals that might have been released when we go out there in the beginning? And does the conservative risk evaluation

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FRTR Presenter: indicate that there is the potential for risk? Again, at the step at the at the tier. One screening. We're really doing a conservative screen to basically determine if there's the potential for risk

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FRTR Presenter: and kind of mirroring what Linda talked about in that 1st box. Planning is the 1st step. And there's where we identify the objectives clearly and early. We want to identify the sampling methods that we're going to use the lab methods, the data evaluation plan. We're going to identify our risk assessment expertise. And we don't want to work in a box because we want to invite

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FRTR Presenter: the Linda's and the Julie's that are doing human health risk assessment along with the hydrogeologists. So when we're going out. And we're collecting information. We're collecting all our information together instead of going out in separate mobilizations because that minimizes ultimately the costs of that investigation.

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FRTR Presenter: And obviously we want to bring our stakeholders in at the beginning. And I emphasize this to our remedial project managers, because at the screening level risk assessment phase. They don't often scope our consultants to go out and actually look

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FRTR Presenter: at a site.

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FRTR Presenter: and that can be a really big mistake. And I'll give you the example of I. When I 1st came back to the navy, we were going out into the field at a site

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FRTR Presenter: that there was potential risk identified to a piciferous bird.

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FRTR Presenter: and the objective was to go out and collect fish in the water body that those piciferous birds could be feeding on.

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FRTR Presenter: The sampling crew went out

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FRTR Presenter: and found that there was no fish in the pond, so they had assumed all through the screening level risk assessment that there was actually fish

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FRTR Presenter: in that wetland ponded area, and there was no fish there.

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FRTR Presenter: Could they have said.

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FRTR Presenter: maybe those those birds are eating on eating amphibians? Yes, but they went out there to collect fish. So they went out there, and they didn't end up collecting anything, but had they conducted the site visit immediately.

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FRTR Presenter: the ecological risk Assessor would have been able to say, this probably isn't the right receptor for this particular

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FRTR Presenter: water body. Maybe we need, or maybe we need to collect and assume that that bird is eating 100% amphibians instead of 100% fish in the food web model.

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FRTR Presenter: And you're going to see this particular conceptual site model later in Jason's presentation. But this is a good graphic representation of basically what we look at, particularly with pfas. And I will say, we emphasize this earlier to have risk, you have to have exposure, and if you don't have exposure, there can't be potential risk to those receptors

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FRTR Presenter: and ecological risk assessments. We unfortunately well, I don't say. Unfortunately, we don't evaluate hypothetical future risk. We evaluate current exposure to ecological receptors.

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FRTR Presenter: We look at what our potential receptors are, we want to look at the terrestrial receptors that might be present if it's a hangar area that's different. If it's a fire training area that might have been used for that 20 years ago, and now is overgrown by trees

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FRTR Presenter: and had a soil removal action done there. And there's no cover

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FRTR Presenter: now there's some terrestrial habitat

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FRTR Presenter: again. If you have aquatic receptors nearby, you need to look at that. And if there's pathways, I think Janet brought up in her presentation earlier this morning that there could be. You need to look and understand your stormwater system, and I can tell you, through looking at data

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FRTR Presenter: that I know of at least 2 locations that the stormwater system has served as an avenue for contaminated groundwater to get to that surface water body. So you have to understand

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FRTR Presenter: that how that those aquatic receptors might be exposed, and then also are there any threatened or endangered species for the navy? This is kind of something that we look at outside of the risk assessment, also because

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FRTR Presenter: each facility has a natural, an integrated natural resources management plan. As a trustee, the navy has to look at what kind of species are on its facilities and develop ways to make sure, especially for endangered species, that they're protected. So using those kind of documents helps us develop

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FRTR Presenter: what our receptors might be, and if they're present at our site.

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FRTR Presenter: and then what are we trying to protect our assessment versus our measurement endpoints, our assessment endpoints could be priciferous birds and protecting their long-term reproductive capabilities.

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FRTR Presenter: The conceptual site model is is basically something that's really important to an ecological risk assessment, because it provides a roadmap for which pathways we want to collect data for and which pathways are completed. Again, it helps us evaluate where what media we might need an era for what be based on the exposure pathways and helps you organize exactly where what kind of media you want to collect, and basically where.

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FRTR Presenter: as also as part of data planning. And this gets into for pfas, what abiotic data we usually do not collect fish tissue data or amphibian tissue data or small rodent data or do toxicity testing as part of a screen. That's not part of a screen. We collect abiotic data, and the media of exposure are typically surface water.

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FRTR Presenter: soil

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FRTR Presenter: and sediment

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FRTR Presenter: and potentially poor water.

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FRTR Presenter: You have to evaluate. What data do I already have for the Navy pfas investigations. We have plenty of site inspection, information, and we got to look at what data we have and how we might supplement it by collecting additional data at the beginning of the Ri. And will my data be adequate for for conducting a tier one? Sierra? And

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FRTR Presenter: I say this, you might go out as part of your site inspection. And we did have site inspections. They collected 3 soil samples. Could you conduct a screening level? Ecological risk assessment with that amount of soil data. Yeah, would it be smart? No.

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FRTR Presenter: because

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FRTR Presenter: you want to be able to do some capability of statistics? Because when you get to the refinement step you want to be able to calculate a 95th Ucl.

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FRTR Presenter: so at least starting out when you're planning to collect at least 8 samples

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FRTR Presenter: which can get you can evaluate through pro pro ucl can help evaluate that some of those statistics.

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FRTR Presenter: and at the screening level we use the maximum concentration, so not only are the exposure assumptions conservative also, the exposure concentration is conservative in that we consider the maximum as what our receptor is exposed to.

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FRTR Presenter: So the result of the tier of the screening level is, in addition, we complete. We compare these Epcs, the exposure point concentrations to conservative screening values and chemicals that exceed the conservative screening values proceed to tier tier, one step 2, and some of the basis of that. Those screening levels.

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FRTR Presenter: the ambient water quality criteria is for different metals. Organics is used. The Eco Ssls

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FRTR Presenter: are used. There's not Eco Ssls for every cercla chemical that's out. There. There's biologic. Some of the regional

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FRTR Presenter: EPA regions have values that they would like to use. Those are often used. Oak Ridge National Laboratory has a database that's often used, and if we don't have any of those often ecological risk, assessors go to the literature and try to find studies to develop their own benchmarks.

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FRTR Presenter: So at the end of Step One, our objective is to narrow down that list. We shouldn't expect to get rid of all of them

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FRTR Presenter: and step 2 is where we get into conducting the exposure, dose, estimateation, and risk calculation. Getting into the hazard quotients.

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FRTR Presenter: we also get into food web modeling. Linda showed some of the modeling that we use for human health. For wildlife. We also use similar models. They're done with excel spreadsheets. We include the concentrations that we might estimate from taking literature based bioaccumulation data. We use high ingestion rates, low body weights.

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FRTR Presenter: Again, area use factors of one. We assume that a bird is getting 100% of its consumption from a 1 acre site, even though we know it has a much larger area that it feeds on.

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FRTR Presenter: So again, it's it's still a conservative evaluation.

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FRTR Presenter: Where do the models come from? Well, like I said, they're built into a lot of spreadsheets for pfas.

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FRTR Presenter: The cert up the strategic environmental research and development program actually had a project that developed

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FRTR Presenter: wildlife exposure models for the Pfas compounds that is readily available and online. I'm sure consultants have their own spreadsheets, but those spreadsheets are available online for common receptors, surrogate receptors that are used across the United States. But again, I'm not going to get into the details of the modeling here just on how basically, they are calculated. And they're still considered conservative. At this point.

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FRTR Presenter: and the effects concentration. Basically, we calculate that dose.

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FRTR Presenter: and then we divide it by the toxicity reference value. And we come up with hazard quotients. If it's less equal to, or less than one. There's acceptable risk. If it's greater than one, there's potential risk. But there's more work to do.

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FRTR Presenter: Trvs. For those that don't know. They can come in many different meanings and acronyms, too many to go over here today, but you might find it as a toxicity benchmark, a noac, which is a no observable effects, concentration, a loac.

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FRTR Presenter: a water quality criteria.

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FRTR Presenter: But no matter what they're derived, most of the Trvs are based off controlled experiments that were conducted in a laboratory with an organism and several doses of a chemical not much different from how human health

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FRTR Presenter: toxicity values are developed.

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FRTR Presenter: Values are obtained from peer review literature. There's some EPA and State agencies may have preferred lists. For example, there are Trv, no owls as part of the EPA's ecological screening levels, efforts for certain chemicals that are commonly used in the screening level of risk assessment.

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FRTR Presenter: So Hq's are greater than one. We're at the end of step 2. This is where it comes in. We gotta communicate the uncertainties of where we are. And at that point we need to say, talk about you know, we use maximum concentrations. We need to provide more detail on the assessment.

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FRTR Presenter: We need to remind not only ourselves, but also our stakeholders, that the eras are conservative and still hypothetical exercises, and we need to discuss what's the predicted outcome.

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FRTR Presenter: Common misperception of a Hq. Over one at a screening level risk. Assessment can mean

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FRTR Presenter: perceived as this.

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FRTR Presenter: when in reality it's this, and these are all sites that Jason Condor or or I have worked at that. All had Hq's greater than one after the screening level risk assessment, but looked like

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FRTR Presenter: functioning and valuable habitat. In fact, one of these, and we can see if you can capture this. Jason's going to be using one of these pictures later, for his example of an ecological risk assessment that was done for pfas site.

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FRTR Presenter: So now we're at the end of Step 2, and we're gonna decided that. Yeah, you know what we think. We have. Hq's greater than one.

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FRTR Presenter: And we need to go to that step. 2. That step 3 or tier, 2. Barra.

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FRTR Presenter: the in the barrow. We do a more realistic evaluation of potential risk. And if potential risk is indicated. Should we collect more data at this point? And this is where we get into doing some of the refinement

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FRTR Presenter: as part of the refinement. We calculate the exposure and effects again, but using less conservative model assumptions. This might be instead of using that maximum concentration. Now, we're calculating 95th Ucls and fitting that back into the model, we might assume that we're instead of using lowest body weights and maximum consumption rates. We start getting site specific with those receptors and use median values as part of our of our input

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FRTR Presenter: and the risk is recalculated again.

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FRTR Presenter: And at this point.

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FRTR Presenter: if the Hq. Still greater than one for certain chemicals.

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FRTR Presenter: We're going to tier to the full baseline risk assessment by this time, though, we have focused down the list of chemicals, or in this case, the list of pfas that might most be driving our risk. And we're going to focus our bearer on that.

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FRTR Presenter: And in the Barra, which is step 3 through 7. This is where we really get into making your risk assessment model, more site specific. We collect more data and rerun the Hqs. But examples of additional data collection can be. What Julie described for the human health is that you're measuring concentrations in

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FRTR Presenter: things that wildlife consume. So you might be looking at fish tissue. You've looked at it for human health, but we're also looking at fish tissue for piciferous birds. We might be conducting toxicity tests which involve

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FRTR Presenter: exposing either the surface water, the soil, or the sediment collected to standard species used in toxicity testing. We can look at bioavailability. I think this morning somebody asked, what parameters other than pfas might be. You might want to collect.

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FRTR Presenter: Jason's going to discuss this later, but total organic carbon is always a good thing to have

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FRTR Presenter: for any organic

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FRTR Presenter: that you measure. You might do pore water, passive sampling used mostly for Pcbs and pahs, but they're developing methods to sample pfas and pour water also that might give you the truly dissolved fraction that's in sediment. Pour water or in surface water. That species are exposed to.

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FRTR Presenter: And this is when you really put the Eco and Eco risk, we can start looking at doing focus species surveys. I'm going to get into one of the ones that I've worked with Usgs on in a little bit. You can do Benthic, invertebrate and aquatic census studies that refers back to that one picture that I showed that Jason's going to be talking about.

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FRTR Presenter: And we start comparing to reference areas because let's face it, there is natural variability within the environment. And we need to compare the site where we have our risk to areas that don't have that chemical exposure, because from that from that release. So we can compare

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FRTR Presenter: Toxicity results. Apples to apples. Are we seeing something that is truly a result of the chemical at our site?

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FRTR Presenter: So now we've gotten to the end of the tier, 3 or to to under the tier 2, Barra, and we're proceeding to the risk evaluation in in tier 3.

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FRTR Presenter: And at this point, yeah, we really think that we have an Hq greater than one

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FRTR Presenter: and get to the point. There's probably that there's unacceptable risk.

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FRTR Presenter: But we've narrowed down our list of chemicals that we started with not screening level risk assessment, and we narrowed it down to the ones that are driving the potential most risk

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FRTR Presenter: and tier 3 is the remedial action, remedial alternatives. Analysis. This is, where do we remediate how and what's the cleanup goal? And then we commonly use those risk assessment models and data from the bear to calculate site specific cleanup goals.

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FRTR Presenter: And then but the other thing that we, Jason and I both stressed. That needs to be looked at is what's the risk to the ecological receptors

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FRTR Presenter: from damaging the habitat while you're trying to do that cleanup. Essentially don't let the cure be worse than in disease.

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FRTR Presenter: I had this specific instance at what's called a heath marsh, a heath wetland up in northeast northeast Maine

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FRTR Presenter: that the wetland near was determined to be there probably over a hundred years.

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FRTR Presenter: and we were looking at. Do we need to remediate it for some petroleum that had migrated into this wetland.

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FRTR Presenter: And that's where you have to balance your remedial alternatives. Yes, my ecological risk assessment said I, might have potential risk. But am I going to be able to recreate this thing that took over a thousand years to basically create? And you have to balance those remedial actions? And what kind of ultimate effect they might have on the local environment.

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FRTR Presenter: So now, getting to pondering the questions, can an era be done for pfas? And this gets back to something that we already discussed this morning.

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FRTR Presenter: Yeah, it can. It can absolutely be done. But it's going to carry uncertainties that. But it's going to carry uncertainties that we have for other circle of chemicals. I will argue with anyone that there is less information for some of the pesticides that we have to sample and analyze, for that are on the Tal. Tcl list than there is for pfas right now.

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FRTR Presenter: What data gaps still exist, I will tell you there's a huge been huge advantages in knowledge when it comes to ecological risk assessment within the last 10 years. Jason's going to get into some of them after me

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FRTR Presenter: there, some of the big ones, and very important as you might imagine to the Navy is, there's a lack of marine aquatic life information, specifically chronic

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FRTR Presenter: EPA just came out with the recommended aquatic criteria for Pfoa and Pfos. They didn't issue chronic marine life numbers one of the reasons they didn't is because there's not enough data on the appropriate number of genus and species out there to be able to calculate it.

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FRTR Presenter: Avian toxicity. There is some avian toxicity data out there. But it's important that we gather more

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FRTR Presenter: field studies to verify

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FRTR Presenter: what basic are basic risk models? Do they represent reality? We can evaluate that more in ecological risk than you can in human health,

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FRTR Presenter: and understanding toxicity of mixtures.

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FRTR Presenter: And this has already been brought up. But are there ambient anthropogenic background levels of pfas that need to be considered outside the circle of release.

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FRTR Presenter: The expanding literature can't be ignored here. There's been background data sets from Vermont, from Maine. They're all over

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FRTR Presenter: the Rsls

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FRTR Presenter: for soil. It's just the the reality of what the data shows.

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FRTR Presenter: We're collecting rainwater rainwater

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FRTR Presenter: can be higher than the Rsls.

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FRTR Presenter: So we got to work within that context of what's out there within the environment, outside the release area. And what does that mean for overall risk management.

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FRTR Presenter: And then what exposures in particular pfas will drive risk.

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FRTR Presenter: Jason's going to be getting into a lot on this, but I will say migration. I think a lot of our speakers today, migration to surface water is a really potential good big exposure area.

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FRTR Presenter: terrestrial, maybe not as much. Because if it was done, if our releases occurred at hangars or someplace like that, there's not an exposure pathway to that soil. But there still might be a pathway to the ecological resources down gradient.

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FRTR Presenter: So filling some of the data gaps. And there's some people in this room that are are part of filling those data gaps the Cert up and Estcp program have put out statements in need of in 2022 to fill the data gaps in marine toxicity. But almost all the studies that have been done by the Navy and CSIRO and Geo. Syntac

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FRTR Presenter: have almost been completed for those marine species, and the army is also doing a lot of

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FRTR Presenter: important species that will inevitably help create a marine chronic criteria.

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FRTR Presenter: the avian toxicity and bioaccumulation. There's a great project being done by Matt Ederson, from EPA and Christine Custer from Usgs, that I've been personally a part with Christine, and ecotoxicity of mixtures is also being addressed.

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FRTR Presenter: This is actually a slide, and I appreciate Chris Custer, providing this to me. It provides the importance of 2 things in field study, one, as you can see on the left

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FRTR Presenter: all reference areas had p measurable pfas in

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FRTR Presenter: the concentrations of tree swallow diets collected from 2021, or 2021 and 2022 and 2020. Yeah, for the Pax River site all 3 years.

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FRTR Presenter: So you're not going to find a reference site that has 0 pfas.

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FRTR Presenter: even in biological organisms.

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FRTR Presenter: and in this case it was what the tree swallows feed on, and then on the right you get to see something that you also is valuable. From assessment standpoint. You start to see the pfas that are bioaccumulating up the food chain for these kind of receptors. You see the illustrated here with the dark colored boxes. You see those that were most detected in eggs, nestlings, plasma, and ultimately with Pfos, the diet.

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FRTR Presenter: and that kind of information tells us from these field studies. Okay.

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FRTR Presenter: these species are exposed to these Pfos. By the way, those are Pfos mixtures.

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FRTR Presenter: And are we still seeing reproductive effects.

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FRTR Presenter: for when this higher exposure occurs, and, as you can see here on the left.

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FRTR Presenter: there's higher exposure

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FRTR Presenter: stay tuned for Chris's publication on whether there's actually risk reproductive risk to those same species.

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FRTR Presenter: So some closing thoughts here

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FRTR Presenter: again, ecological risk assessments for pfas can be completed. Following the circular era, guidance, uncertainty is always going to exist. It has to be discussed.

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FRTR Presenter: We even discuss, when we do these, where we're doing the early screening level risk assessments, how much uncertainty we need to bracket in our uncertainty discussions not unlike the human health risk assessments that are being completed. Now, also.

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FRTR Presenter: several areas of the data gaps are really being filled through ongoing research.

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FRTR Presenter: Some level of exposure is going to be inherent across the country. It's just whether you're looking at rainwater surface water, sediment soil. It's there, and it's it's not from a discernible source, at least a direct point source. And but the ultimately, what does that mean for risk? Management, not for the risk assessment. What does it mean for risk management?

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FRTR Presenter: And there's a great deal to learn from field studies, as field studies are more completed. As more field studies, especially early on in these ris are completed

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FRTR Presenter: with suspected exposures that will validate the modeling and predictions and the occurrence of ecologically relevant effects, survival growth and reproduction which will help apply to later eras.

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FRTR Presenter: I would throw this out that could a model like that used in the EPA's Eco Ssl effort be really used for developing a comprehensive

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FRTR Presenter: ecological screening level approach.

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FRTR Presenter: The Air Force and Argonne National Laboratory have done something similar for soil and surface water for 8 pfas. But there's more pfas that are out there. We know we're getting more data, I think, having something that's a multi agency. This is a multi agency group that gets together with appropriate folks that are

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FRTR Presenter: fielded. An ecological risk assessment

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FRTR Presenter: can be put together to help develop these screening levels. So we don't have these repetitive updates. Use this for your screening level, then starts considering site specific ecological risk assessment later.

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FRTR Presenter: And then, lastly, I'll leave you with this quote, because we had the quotes early on, this is my quote, let good science

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FRTR Presenter: dictate and serve to develop policy and not the other way around.

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FRTR Presenter: Because I think

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FRTR Presenter: this is just my personal opinion. It's not that of the Navy's that we've been driving a lot

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FRTR Presenter: of science based on policy and not sign the policy based on the science lately, and that might not just be for pfas.

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FRTR Presenter: But that's just overall my just general perspective, because I'm a firm believer

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FRTR Presenter: that you might have science that said, if the science says something, there it is, let's develop policy around it.

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FRTR Presenter: And with that there's my contact information. I want to thank Carla for inviting me here. Jason Condor, who's gonna speak next? He helped me develop a lot of these slides, and he's like my, I don't know. Want to say he's like the Michael. I'm the Scotty Pippin, and he's my Michael Jordan like I talked to him a lot.

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FRTR Presenter: and I also want to say, you know, you meet certain people in life that really made an impact and doing work with Christine Custer over the last 4 years has been awesome. She is like a wealth of knowledge.

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FRTR Presenter: I know a lot of people here from Usgs are very familiar with her work.

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FRTR Presenter: but during Covid. She let me go out and help her do field work.

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FRTR Presenter: and it really was the enjoyable part of my week getting out there and actually seeing as we went along in years. The more we went along the more tree swallows that migrated into our area.

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FRTR Presenter: and so in the last year we had the 2024 was not shown in those slides. We had the most tree swallows habitatting former Naval Air station, Joint Reserve Base, Willow Grove and Biddle Air National Guard that we had probably combined the previous 3 season, which means that the birds were coming back after they were born.

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FRTR Presenter: And that's it.

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FRTR Presenter: Alright, Kent, are we moving on to the next speaker? Just in the interest?

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FRTR Presenter: Amazing?