FREDERICA

FREDERICA

The FASSET project identified that any system for assessing the impact of a contaminant on the environment requires an analysis of the possible effects on the organisms and ecosystems concerned and produced two key outputs: 1) the FASSET (2003) Deliverable D4 publication and 2) the FASSET Radiation Effects Database (hereafter known as FRED) to help to address these issues. FASSET (2003) reviewed the information contained within FRED and used it to extract summary information on the effects of ionising radiation on different wildlife groups under four umbrella endpoint headings: mutation, morbidity, reproductive capacity and mortality.
It is apparent from the work conducted in the FASSET project that the availability of data is deficient in many respects, particularly in terms of information relevant to the radiation dose rates likely to occur in the environment as a consequence of anthropogenic activities involving the use of radioactive substances and for many of the wildlife groups and umbrella effect categories of concern.
Within the FASSET project, 1,033 references were reviewed and entered in FRED. FRED covered literature on the biological effects following exposure to ionising radiation for the time period 1945 to 2001. The database contained approximately 25,000 data entries. At the time of the project, FRED was designed as a method of extracting and collating the information from the scientific literature and there was little thought given to the method of outputting the collated data for subsequent evaluation. Furthermore, FRED was a stand alone product distributed via CD or download on to a personal computer from the FASSET website and was known to only contain a proportion of the available literature on the biological effects of exposure to ionising radiation. Finally, there were a few issues relating to the consistency and applicability of the information entered into FRED.
To address these issues within the ERICA project, Work Package 1 has been further developing FRED by:
• Merging FRED with the effects database that was produced under the EPIC2 project. The EPIC database contains a large dataset from Russia-language literature on the biological effects of exposure to ionising radiation;
• Insertion of the post 2001 articles and a review of the existing data for any obvious missing references;
• Undertaking a review of the reference data already collated within FRED;
• Producing an online version of the database (to avoid problems with future version updates) and to facilitate integration with the ERICA assessment tool;
• Updating the structure of the database in line with comments received on the user-friendliness of FRED and to improve the search capability and outputting of the data.
There are two phases to this work. The first phase focuses on getting FRED online (including some limited structural changes to the database), undertaking the review of the references included in FRED and insertion of post 2001 to end 2004 references and merging of FRED and EPIC database to produce the online FREDERICA effects database (hereafter known as FREDERICA). The second phase will insert new references up to the end of the ERICA project (including the output from the experiments being conducted in Work Package 2), improve the search and output capabilities and integrate FREDERICA with the ERICA assessment tool.