morse: an R-package to analyse toxicity test data

Abstract

The morse package is used for the analysis of experimental data collected from standard toxicity tests. It provides ready-to-use functions to visualize a dataset and to estimate several toxicity indices to be further used in support of environmental risk assessment in full compliance with regulatory requirements (OECD, 2006). Such toxicity indices are indeed typically requested by standardized regulatory guidelines on which national agencies base their evaluation of applications for regulatory approval of chemical substances; see for example OECD toxicity testing guideline (OECD, 2012, 2016). Tools gathered together within the morse package involve the most advanced and innovative methods developed for ecotoxicology, such as appropriate stochastic parts in dose-response modelling (Delignette-Muller et al., 2014), and the use of Bayesian statistics to get parameter estimates as posterior probability distribution (Billoir et al., 2008). Hence, these tools are easily accessible for ecotoxicologists and regulators who do not need to deeply invest in the underlying technicalities in order to perform a valuable quantitative environmental risk assessment.