Chemical Mixtures and Multiple Stressors: Same but Different?

Abstract

Ecosystems are strongly influenced by multiple anthropogenic stressors, including a wide range of chemicals and their mixtures. Studies on the effects of multiple stressors have largely focussed on nonchemical stressors, whereas studies on chemical mixtures have largely ignored other stressors. However, both research areas face similar challenges and require similar tools and methods to predict the joint effects of chemicals or nonchemical stressors, and frameworks to integrate multiple chemical and nonchemical stressors are missing. We provide an overview of the research paradigms, tools, and methods commonly used in multiple stressor and chemical mixture research and discuss potential domains of cross‐fertilization and joint challenges. First, we compare the general paradigms of ecotoxicology and (applied) ecology to explain the historical divide. Subsequently, we compare methods and approaches for the identification of interactions, stressor characterization, and designing experiments. We suggest that both multiple stressor and chemical mixture research are too focused on interactions and would benefit from integration regarding null model selection. Stressor characterization is typically more costly for chemical mixtures. While for chemical mixtures comprehensive classification systems at suborganismal level have been developed, recent classification systems for multiple stressors account for environmental context. Both research areas suffer from rather simplified experimental designs that focus on only a limited number of stressors, chemicals, and treatments. We discuss concepts that can guide more realistic designs capturing spatiotemporal stressor dynamics. We suggest that process‐based and data‐driven models are particularly promising to tackle the challenge of prediction of effects of chemical mixtures and nonchemical stressors on (meta‐)communities and (meta‐)food webs. We propose a framework to integrate the assessment of effects for multiple stressors and chemical mixtures. Environ Toxicol Chem 2023;42:1915–1936. © 2023 The Authors. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of SETAC.