Author Description

Although community level toxicity testing is now being used for practical purposes, it is not the intent of this book to espouse the use of community level testing in all situations or to replace single-species tests that are the best source of information on growth, reproductive success, behavior, and a variety of other end points. On the other hand, since field validation of laboratory predictions is becoming increasingly important and since community level testing offers the possibility of validation by using more comparable or identical end points in complex natural systems, which is not possible for single-species tests, it is now worthy of attention by ASTM members.