The envirotox R data package provides Species Sensitivity Distribution
(SSD) datasets from the Envirotox
database 2.0.0 (Connors et
al. 2019).
The datasets are provided for assessing general patterns in SSD data and testing code. The datasets should not be used to draw any conclusions about the toxicity of the individual chemicals.
The package provides three data frames: envirotox_acute and
envirotox_chronic, which give the species concentrations for acute and
chronic toxicity tests, respectively, and envirotox_chemical, which
maps each chemical name to its original Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS)
registry number. Use list_datasets() to list the available datasets.
In envirotox_acute and envirotox_chronic each chemical (the
Chemical column) constitutes a separate SSD dataset, with one row per
species (Species) giving the geometric mean concentration (Conc, in
micrograms per litre) and taxonomic group (Group).
The data is aggregated based on the
code
provided by Yanagihara et al. (2024) with three exceptions: the
envirotox package also includes chemical datasets with 1) a bimodality
coefficient > 0.555, 2) between six and nine species; and 3) two
groups.
A logical column called Yanagihara24 indicates which chemical datasets
are consistent with the criteria used by Yanagihara et al. (2024), which
required a bimodality coefficient $<=$ 0.555, at least 10 species and
three groups. A second logical column called Iwasaki25 in
envirotox_acute indicates the chemical datasets included by Iwasaki et
al. (2025).
To install the most recent version from GitHub
# install.packages("pak")
# pak::pak("poissonconsulting/envirotox")
install.packages("envirotox", repos = c('https://poissonconsulting.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))
Connors, K.A., Beasley, A., Barron, M.G., Belanger, S.E., Bonnell, M., Brill, J.L., de Zwart, D., Kienzler, A., Krailler, J., Otter, R., Phillips, J.L., and Embry, M.R. 2019. Creation of a Curated Aquatic Toxicology Database: EnviroTox. Enviro Toxic and Chemistry 38(5): 1062–1073. doi:10.1002/etc.4382.
Iwasaki, Y., and Yanagihara, M. 2025. Comparison of model-averaging and single-distribution approaches to estimating species sensitivity distributions and hazardous concentrations for 5% of species. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 44(3): 834–840. doi:10.1093/etojnl/vgae060.
Yanagihara, M., Hiki, K., and Iwasaki, Y. 2024. Which distribution to choose for deriving a species sensitivity distribution? Implications from analysis of acute and chronic ecotoxicity data. Ecotoxicology and environmental safety 278: 116379. doi:10.1016/j.ecoenv.2024.116379.