The envirotox R data package provides Species Sensitivity Distribution (SSD) datasets from the Envirotox database 2.0.0 (Connors et al. 2019).
The datasets are provided for assessing general patterns in SSD data and testing code. The datasets should not be used to draw any conclusions about the toxicity of the individual chemicals.
The package provides three data frames: envirotox_acute and envirotox_chronic, which give the species concentrations for acute and chronic toxicity tests, respectively, and envirotox_chemical, which maps each chemical name to its original Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) registry number. Use list_datasets() to list the available datasets. In envirotox_acute and envirotox_chronic each chemical (the Chemical column) constitutes a separate SSD dataset, with one row per species (Species) giving the geometric mean concentration (Conc, in micrograms per litre) and taxonomic group (Group).
The data is aggregated based on the code provided by Yanagihara et al. (2024) with three exceptions: the envirotox package also includes chemical datasets with 1) a bimodality coefficient > 0.555, 2) between six and nine species; and 3) two groups.
A logical column called Yanagihara24 indicates which chemical datasets are consistent with the criteria used by Yanagihara et al. (2024), which required a bimodality coefficient <= 0.555, at least 10 species and three groups. A second logical column called Iwasaki25 in envirotox_acute indicates the chemical datasets included by Iwasaki et al. (2025).
Installation
To install the most recent version from GitHub
# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("poissonconsulting/envirotox")References
Connors, K.A., Beasley, A., Barron, M.G., Belanger, S.E., Bonnell, M., Brill, J.L., de Zwart, D., Kienzler, A., Krailler, J., Otter, R., Phillips, J.L., and Embry, M.R. 2019. Creation of a Curated Aquatic Toxicology Database: EnviroTox. Enviro Toxic and Chemistry 38(5): 1062–1073. doi:10.1002/etc.4382.
Iwasaki, Y., and Yanagihara, M. 2025. Comparison of model-averaging and single-distribution approaches to estimating species sensitivity distributions and hazardous concentrations for 5% of species. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 44(3): 834–840. doi:10.1093/etojnl/vgae060.
Yanagihara, M., Hiki, K., and Iwasaki, Y. 2024. Which distribution to choose for deriving a species sensitivity distribution? Implications from analysis of acute and chronic ecotoxicity data. Ecotoxicology and environmental safety 278: 116379. doi:10.1016/j.ecoenv.2024.116379.