Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2013C00288:reg:5:p2
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2013C00288
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 5 (pt 2/5)
Character Range: 1600831–1604290

and plants.
Test species       Geometric mean (mg/kg)
Common name        Scientific name         NOEC or EC10  LOEC or EC30  EC50
Earthworm          Eisenia fetida          54            135           270
European rabbit    Oryctolagus cuniculus   2000          5000          10 000
House mouse        Mus musculus            407           1018          2036
Lettuce            L. sativa               21            54            107
Mite               Acari spp               232           580           1160
Mite               Mesostigmata spp.       195           487           973
Mite               Oribatida sp.           219           547           1094
Northern bobwhite  C. virginianus          1000          2500          5000
Common rat         R. norvegicus           1000          2500          5000
Radish             R. sativa               61            153           305
Spider             Grammonata inornata     177           443           886
Springtail         Collembola spp.         214           535           1070
Springtail         F. fimetaria            20            50            100
Springtail         Poduromorpha spp.       203           508           1016

5.4              Normalisation relationships
It is well known that the organic carbon (OC) or organic matter content of soils affects the toxicity and bioavailabiity of organic contaminants such as naphthalene. European guidelines use normalisation relationships for organic contaminants (ECB 2003), but these have not yet been verified for Australian soils. In fact, when data for soils with OC contents greater than typical Australian soils was removed, OC was no longer a useful descriptor of toxicity (Broos et al. 2007). While the above example is for an inorganic contaminant, it shows the potential for European normalisation relationships to be inappropriate for Australia. As Australian soils are in general low in organic carbon, it was not recommended to use European normalisation relationships (Schedule B5b). There were no normalisation relationships available for naphthalene. Therefore, the toxicity data could not be normalised to the Australian reference soil, nor could soil-specific SQGs be derived.

5.5              Sensitivity of organisms to naphthalene
The SSD for the naphthalene toxicity data is presented in Figure 5. As there was only toxicity data for 14 different species, insufficient data was available to make a robust assessment of the relative sensitivity of the groups of organisms. Nonetheless, it appears that plant and soil invertebrate species were more sensitive to naphthalene than vertebrate species, as the vertebrate toxicity data was all higher than those for other species. An argument could be mounted to exclude the terrestrial vertebrates from the calculation of the SQGs; however, this was not adopted, for three reasons. Firstly, the data was sparse and therefore the differences in the relative sensitivity of the groups of organisms may not be real. Secondly, the terrestrial vertebrates represent a major group of organisms that most people would wish to be able to maintain in urban residential/public open space settings. Thirdly, removal of these species only had a minor effect on the resulting SQG(NOEC & EC10) (i.e. the PC80 for all species was 68 mg/kg while the corresponding value when the vertebrates were removed was 60 mg/kg).
Figure 5. The species sensitivity distribution (plotted as a cumulative