Abstract：
Water quality criteria (WQC) serve as a scientific foundation for pollutant risk assessment and control in aquatic ecosystems. The development of regionally differentiated WQC tailored to specific regional characteristics has become an emerging trend. However, the current WQC is constrained by a lack of regional species toxicity data. To address these limitations, this study proposes the biological toxicity effect ratio (BER) method, which indirectly reflects the toxicity sensitivity of the overall aquatic ecosystem through the toxicity information on a limited number of species, enabling rapid WQC prediction. Using the established WQC in China and the USA as a case study, we combined mathematical derivation and data validation to evaluate the BER method. Among various species-taxon groups of freshwater organisms, planktonic crustaceans demonstrated the highest predictive accuracy. Our analysis further revealed that species toxicity sensitivity and regional variability jointly influence the prediction accuracy. Regardless of the evaluation indexes, planktonic crustaceans emerged as the most suitable species-taxon group for the BER method. Additionally, the BER method is particularly applicable to pollutants with conserved mechanisms across species. This study systematically explores the feasibility of using the BER method and offers new insights for deriving regionally differentiated WQC.
摘要：
水质标准（WQC）是水生生态系统污染物风险评估和控制的科学依据。发展针对特定区域特征的区域差异化WQC已成为新兴趋势。然而,当前的WQC受到缺乏区域物种毒性数据的限制。为了解决这些限制，本研究提出了生物毒性效应比(BER)方法，通过有限数量物种的毒性信息间接反映整个水生生态系统的毒性敏感性，实现快速WQC预测。以中国和美国建立的WQC为例，我们结合数学推导和数据验证来评估BER方法。在淡水生物的各种物种分类群群体中，浮游甲壳类动物表现出最高的预测准确性。我们的分析进一步表明，物种毒性敏感性和区域变异性共同影响预测精度。无论评估指标如何，浮游甲壳类动物成为BER方法最合适的物种分类群。此外,BER方法特别适用于具有跨物种保守机制的污染物。本研究系统地探讨了使用BER方法的可行性，并为推导区域差异化的WQC提供了新的见解。
