ABSTRACT
Ecological risk assessments may address the environments of real places, generic places, or
representative places. Real places include sites contaminated with wastes or spills, the sites of
effluents or industrial facilities, forests or rangelands to be managed, or other actual locations
with real physical and biological properties. The obvious advantage of real places is that
their properties may be observed or measured. The disadvantage is that, in order to avoid
obviously unrealistic results, one must expend one’s time and resources to obtain observations
and measurements from the site.
