Ballast water risk assessment: principles, processes, and methods

Evaluation of ballast water risk assessment

Risk Assessment as a Decision Supporting Tool in Ballast Water Management

After almost two decades of intensified research, regulatory and political activities focussed on the prevention of harmful organisms and pathogen transfers around the world, in 2004 the International Convention on the Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediments (BWM Convention) was adopted to provide for a common and globally uniform ballast water management (BWM) approach. Recognising th...

Optimizing methods to estimate zooplankton concentration based on generalized patterns of patchiness inside ballast tanks and ballast water discharges

Zooplankton populations are spatially heterogeneous in nature and inside ship ballast tanks. Sampling methods should take heterogeneity into account, particularly when estimating quantitative variables such as abundance or concentration. It is particularly important to generate unbiased estimates of zooplankton concentration in ballast water when assessing compliance with new international ball...

Principles in genetic risk assessment

Risk assessment constitutes an essential component of genetic counseling and testing, and the genetic risk should be estimated as accurately as possible for individual and family decision making. All relevant information retrieved from population studies and pedigree and genetic testing enhances the accuracy of the assessment of an individual's genetic risk. This review will focus on the follow...

Risk assessment and water management

In order to implement water management in a sustainable way, the related decisionmaking processes have to take the ecological and socio-economic consequences into account. In the Netherlands, policy makers struggle with the question how they can deal with risks associated with flooding. Flood prevention is one of the pillars of water management that aims at reducing the likelihood of flooding a...