Translating Ecological Realism into Ecotoxicology: An Experimental Approach for Assessing Plant Biodiversity

In this study, we developed a community-level ecotoxicological approach using soil seed banks as a representative ecological proxy. By reconstructing diverse plant assemblages directly from field-sampled soil (26 species, 455 individual plants), we evaluated the impacts of a model chemical (cadmium, Cd) on multidimensional end points, including plant diversity, biomass productivity, and co-occurrence networks.

Our findings revealed a discrepancy between individual and community-level sensitivities: the effective concentration 10% (EC₁₀) for the Shannon–Wiener index was 76.36 mg kg^–1, which is approximately 20-fold higher than the hazardous concentration 5% derived from conventional species sensitivity distribution (SSD) models. Although these metrics differ in their conceptual basis, this gap offers critical insights into the conservative margin of regulatory standards.