Being an ecotoxicologist, Prof. Valery Forbes is a leading figure in improving the ecological risk assessment (ERA) of chemicals in the environment. After her PhD in coastal oceanography, she worked in Europe for 22 years, where she was the Founding Head of the Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change and the Dean of Natural Sciences at Roskilde University, Denmark. In 2011 she returned to the USA, first as Director of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska; since 2015 she is Dean of the College of Biological Sciences, University of Minnesota.

Ecological risk assessment of chemicals, in particular pesticides, involves regulatory authorities, academia, and industry. For more than 20 years, Prof. Forbes has been extremely active in this field in research, scientific societies, teaching, industry consulting, as a member of European panels (Directorate General for Health and Food Safety - European Commission; European Food Safety Authority, EFSA), as PI and Co-PI of a large number of national and European projects, and as a reviewer and evaluator for academia, regulators, and industry.

Scientific Merits

Prof. Forbes has published 134 articles referenced in Web of Science, with 3543 citations and an h-index of 33; the corresponding figures in Google Scholar are 234 publication, 6564 citations, and h-index of 43. Her articles have an average number of citations of 26 (Web of Science). She also published a book (Ecotoxicology in Theory and Practice) as a postdoc and has edited or co-edited several books and journal special issues. She has supervised a total of 61 graduate students and postdocs and is currently supervising 4 postdocs and one graduate student. Her current projects are focused on modelling the effects of multiple stressors on populations and ecosystem services (postdocs Galic and Accolla); predicting the impacts of pesticides on threatened and endangered plant species (postdoc Rueda-Cediel); and the role of the gut microbiome in contaminant metabolism by estuarine polychaetes (postdoc Hochstein and PhD student Apazoglou).

For more than two decades she has been fighting for making regulatory risk assessments more ecologically relevant. She has written numerous programmatic and influential articles, challenging the state of the art. For example her critique of “species sensitivity distributions” drew attention to the widespread misinterpretation of such distributions as protective of particular ecosystems (see Forbes and Calow 2002; HERA 8: 473-492). She has also been a vocal critic of biomarkers as risk assessment endpoints (see Forbes et al. 2006; Environ Toxicol Chem. 25:272-280) and other approaches to risk assessment that ignore life history and other ecological complexities. In her critiques, she always outlined ways to improve current practice, or to link new approaches for the purpose of improving risk assessment.

To understand her motivation, a short introduction is needed: Current risk assessment schemes were developed in response to the book “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson from 1962 where she demonstrated how the use of unsafe pesticides such as DDT threatens humans and ecosystems. Since then, in particular in Europe and North America, risk assessment is based on two elements: laboratory tests of individuals of standard test species, to determine toxicity, and an estimation of the amount of exposure in the environment. The ratio of toxicity to exposure is used to define thresholds of risk that are accepted. High toxicity can be compensated by low exposure, and vice versa. However, laboratory tests do not take into account ecological effects and heterogeneous environments. Therefore, safety factors between 10 and 1000 are used to make risk assessment more conservative. The choice of these factors is completely arbitrary. As a consequence, current regulation might allow the use of pesticides and other chemicals which are actually harmful, or ban the use in cases where the chemicals would have been safe. Moreover, current regulation addresses one compound at a time, while in reality mixtures are used. It also remains unclear what level of effects is acceptable for populations, and what all this means for ecosystem services.

Accordingly, Prof. Forbes has made major contributions to the following fields:

Population modelling in ecotoxicology and ecological risk assessment.

Ecological and individual-level models that mechanistically represent the effects of chemicals at the individual and/or population level link assessments of toxicity and exposure to population-level endpoints in real landscapes, and can be used to predict recovery or risk of extinction. For this purpose, good modelling practice has to be followed. Prof. Forbes was part of the team that established such a practice, which was largely adopted by EFSA. In numerous articles, including manifestos, reviews, and research papers, she has contributed to the increasing acceptance of mechanistic models by regulators; for example EFSA launched the development of a honeybee model; US regulatory bodies EPA are in the process of developing models for hundreds of threatened plant and animal species.

Challenging current practices (e.g., biomarkers, SSDs, AOPs, extrapolation methods) in ecological risk assessment and development of alternative approaches.

Modern analytical methods allow us to quickly identify a wide range of substances, even at very low concentrations, that may serve as biomarkers indicating the level of chemical stress to which an organism is exposed. Biomarker research, however, by itself does not link to the level of populations or ecosystems. Prof. Forbes has advocated and pushed forward an integrated approach, which links effects diagnosed with biomarkers to ecologically relevant effects using mechanistic modelling.

Fate and effects of toxic chemicals in aquatic sediment systems.

Virtually all of Prof. Forbes original research has focused on aquatic systems and their sediments. Many of the most problematic anthropogenic pollutants (such as heavy metals, oil compounds, pesticides, etc.) accumulate preferentially in sediments. Organisms that live in and feed on sediments are at particular risk of exposure and are also key players in biodegrading many of these chemicals so that they do not accumulate in food chains. Previously it was believed that toxic chemicals bound to sediments were not available for uptake by biota. Prof Forbes was among the first researchers to demonstrate conclusively that sediments can be a dominant source of chemical exposure for sediment-feeding organisms, and she has documented how such species influence and are influenced by sediment contaminants with consequences for the wider ecosystem.

Ecosystem services as new endpoints for ecological risk assessment.

The target output, or endpoint, of risk assessment varies for different kinds of organisms. For humans, adverse effects of, for example carcinogens or endocrine disruptors on individuals are considered unacceptable. For populations of animals and plants, individual mortality or sub-lethal effects are generally tolerated if those effects do not significantly impair their populations, e.g. if populations can recover via immigration or density-dependent compensation. More recently, there has been growing interest in linking population and community responses to impacts on ecosystem service delivery (i.e., those direct benefits that humans derive from ecosystems). Prof. Forbes was involved in ESFA workshops and review articles on using ecosystem services as risk assessment endpoints and is currently leading an initiative sponsored by the National Institute of Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) to develop mechanistic models that can link impacts of chemicals from molecular and biochemical responses, through effects on individual organisms, to impacts on populations, communities and ecosystem service delivery. This is an extremely ambitious endeavor, which if successful, could have a profound influence on the field.