Response to Buchwalter et al.: Further Considerations for Modernising Water Quality Criteria in the USA and Elsewhere

The Buchwalter et al. ET&C Focus article [1] is a very timely piece given the review of the method used by the USEPA to derive water quality criteria (WQC; [2]), and also because of the ongoing push for increased international harmonization of derivation methods for WQC (and their analogues in other jurisdictions) (e.g. [3, 4, 5]). Buchwalter et al. [1] provide a cogent argument not only for the expansion of the definition of data that are acceptable to derive WQC, but also for a more holistic paradigm to deriving WQC.