However, it is also important to stress that apart from studies on the effects of drilling waste

on sediment macrofauna community structure there is nearly no published information on the effects on populations or communities. Hence, one cannot ignore the possibility of subtle, cumulative effects from the operational discharges which we are not able to measure at present, although risk assessments suggest that this will not be the case. It is a discouraging fact that at the moment there seems to be no options other than risk related modelling for assessing potentially significant effects of produced water discharges at the population and ecosystem levels. Published literature selleck screening library Selleck SB203580 has not yet been able to validate with confidence or empirically verify that the effects of the discharges are only local. We believe that research addressing this challenge should emphasize 1) development of effects methods and endpoints that may be used in health screening of organisms on a scale large enough to reflect population health conditions with confidence, and 2) effects studies that encompass natural species interaction on an ecosystem level. We collectively

thank the project leaders and authors of the PROOF and PROOFNY projects for providing us with electronic reprints, preprints, institute reports and other, partly unpublished, documentation of their results and for informing us about valuable supporting literature. We thank members of the PROOFNY Steering Group for constructive comments and suggestions for this review, several key authors of PROOFNY publications for critical assessments of parts of the manuscript, and Dr HC Morton at the Institute of Rucaparib Marine Research for correcting the English language. Thanks also to three anonymous reviewers for very constructive comments and suggestions for improvement of the manuscript. This review has been made under contract number 201006689 from the Research Council of Norway to the Norwegian

Institute of Water Research. “
“The authors regret that when the above article was published, the name of ministry was changed but had not been corrected in the text (acknowledgement). Ministry and project number in acknowledgement are corrected as below. This work was supported by a grant (PM 57431) funded to Jae-Seong Lee from the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries and also supported by a grant (No. 2009-0067801) funded to Young-Mi Lee from the National Research Foundation. The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused. “
“The authors regret that in the abstract and general text sections, the unit of PCB126 concentration was incorrect. This has now been corrected below 1.