Metal mining environmental effects monitoring program

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Close mobile search navigation Article navigation. Volume 37, Issue 1. Previous Article Next Article. Article Navigation. Research Article February 01 This Site. In the original EEM program, an effect is defined as a simple statistically significant difference between a reference and exposed site.

The current technical guidance document requires only one reference and exposed site. Because it is pseudo-replicated, with sufficient power it is very likely that the study will find a statistically significant difference between the reference and exposed sites. Thus, EC recommended the implementation of Critical Effects Sizes, or a threshold difference between reference and exposed sites.

Critical Effect Sizes CES , defined as thresholds above which effects may be indicative of a potential higher risk to the environment, have been developed for the fish population and benthic invertebrate community components of the MMER-EEM program. Given these challenges, there have been questions as to whether the conclusions drawn from the Second National Assessment are sufficiently informative, and what changes can and should be made to the EEM program.

Though neither study replicated the meta-analysis of the Second National Assessment, both questioned the methodology of the EEM studies, and suggested that the findings of the Second National Assessment were due to confounding factors. Both reports supported implementing CES, but also suggested other changes to the EEM studies, such as utilizing a Bonferroni Correction on the level of significance to account for performing multiple tests.

In order to inform our policy recommendations, we undertook our own meta-analysis of these same data to determine whether the MMER guidelines are protective of the receiving environment nationally, and how methodological changes suggested by Environment Canada and the Mining Association of Canada would affect interpretation of monitoring results.

The effects on gonad size were variable between phases Table 1.