October 14, 2026 by Iain Wilson

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wca are long standing partners of SETAC. This year we will have a major presence at the SETAC North America meeting being held in Montreal from the 2nd to 5th November 2026. We will be presenting our work in both platform and poster form, as well as co-chairing a session and running a training course in implementing CREED (Criteria for Reporting and Evaluating Exposure Datasets); a full breakdown of wca’s involvement is detailed below.

Sessions chaired:

Innovative Approaches for Difficult-to-Test Substances and Unknown or Variable Composition, Complex Reaction Products or Biological Materials. Rhiannon Smith will co-chairing the platform session with Megan Solan, Sandrine Deglin and Michael Beking on Wednesday 4th November 2026 between 1:30 PM – 3:30 PM in Room 513def. A poster session will also be held on the same day in the Exhibition Hall.

Platform presentations:

Deriving and Implementing an Ecologically Relevant Environmental Quality Standard for Aluminium in the UK: Utilising Existing Approaches and Remaining Challenges. Graham Merrington, Adam Peters, Charlotte Linley, Steve Lofts, Jay Bullen and Mark Craig at 11:00 on Tuesday 3rd November in Room 516de.

Addressing chronic aquatic toxicity test requirements for difficult to test surfactants (id#20261). Rhiannon Smith, Becky Brown and Erin Maloney. 13.30 on Wednesday 4th November in Room 513def.

Data Quality Issues in Deriving Environmental Quality Standards Under the European Water Framework Directive: A Growing Culture of Misuse and Mistrust? Iain Wilson, Graham Merrington and Dean Leverett at 16:50 on Wednesday 4th November in Room 516c

The Use of Monitoring Data for Surface Waters in Europe in Pharmaceutical Risk Assessments: The Need To Ensure Those Data Are Reliable and Relevant. Iain Wilson and Graham Merrington at 14:10 on Thursday 5th November in Room 516c

Poster presentations:

Assessing the endocrine disruptor potential of hydrocarbon UVCBs. Becky Brown, Rhiannon Smith, Olivia Tran, Kate Roylance, Owen Green, Delina Lyon, Leslie Saunders, Kat Colvin, Anna Tan Sépot and Nicholas Synhaeve on Tuesday 3rd November.

Retrospective Analysis of Concentration-Response Data From Regulatory Studies Used for Endocrine Disruption Assessment in Fish. Richard Maunder, Becky Brown, Grace Panter, Daniel Pickford, Lennart Weltje, James Wheeler and Laurent Lagadic on Tuesday 3rd November.

The Development and Implementation of a Bioavailability-Based Environmental Quality Standard for Uranium Under the European Water Framework Directive. Graham Merrington, Iain Wilson, Lucy Kennelly, Melanie Trenfield, Andrew Harford, Adam Peters, Steve Lofts, Matti Leppanen, Johanna Järvistö, Karsten Liber, Markus Hecker, Andreas Aronsson, Nils Eriksson and Torbjörn Karlsson on Tuesday 3rd November.

Assessing the Ecological Relevance of Freshwater European Environmental Quality Standards for Copper Using Field-Collected Biological Data. Graham Merrington, Iain Wilson, Adam Peters, Tara Miller and Erin Smith on Tuesday 3rd November

Environmental Hazard Assessment of Metal Salts of Naphthenic Acids. Rhiannon Smith, Oliver Tosic and Becky Marks on Thursday 5th November.

Case studies from the lubricants industry of some of the challenges and solutions for conducting aquatic toxicity testing on metal carboxylate salts. Rhiannon Smith, Sylwia Kosmala-Grzechnik and Lucy Kennelly on Thursday 5th November.

The Development of Marine Organism Fertilisation Tests Suitable for Use in Chemical Risk Assessment. Graham Merrington, Dean Leverett and Tom Austin on Thursday 5th November.

Training Course:

Ensure measured chemicals data are reliable and relevant for your intended purpose: Use CREED. Graham Merrington, Iain Wilson and Adam Ryan will guide you through the CREED approach, highlighting ‘good’ and ‘not so good’ practices, providing an opportunity for you to apply CREED to evaluate your own datasets for your own purpose(s). The course is being held on Monday 2nd November between 08:30 and 12:00 in Room 520d (please note if you wish to attend this needs to be included in your meeting registration as an Add-On).

Meetings:

Metals Interest Group Meeting;  in Room 510AC on Wednesday 4th November between 17:30 and 19:30. Graham Merrington will presenting on “The influence of test temperature of chronic freshwater ecotoxicity data for nickel on Species Sensitivity Distribution outputs: should data be split or lumped?” The work is co-authored by Adam Peters and Emily Garman.

We will also be providing updates throughout the meeting on our Linkedin page.

We look forward to a great meeting, and hope to see you at SETAC Montreal.