Page History

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To be honest perhaps the plant geometries have not been well thoughout thought out to date - they do not really represent whole-organisms as perhaps implied by documentation accompanying the ERICA Tool. The grass geometry in the ERICA Tool is taken from the ICRP Wild Grass RAP and is a 'grass spike'; no in soil dose rates are estimated only above ground. If you are concerned that the default plant may not adequately represent the species you want to assess then have a play with the create organism function of Tier 2 or 3: create an organism to represent your marigold leaf and compare DCC values to the default grass. We'd be interested to hear what you find.

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Question:
In the ERICA Tool are the all of the DCC values estimated using the same methodology or is Monte-Carlo simulation used on for terrestrial organisms?

Answer:

The key factor in the estimation of DCC is the absorbed fraction, and this is always calculated by Monte Carlo simulation using a phantom geometry. The only difference is that, historically, in FASSET, the aquatic and terrestrial formulas were calculated by two different Monte Carlo methods, but for ERICA the Ulanovsky and Proehl sphericity method (see ERICA papers) was adopted for everything, after having checked that, for aquatic organisms, both methods gave very similar results.

Answered by Jordi Vives i Batlle 23/09/2010

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