[Weight of evidence (WOE) approach and its application in sediment quality assessment of coastal ecosystem: a review].

At present, chemical approaches are the main tools adopted to assess the contaminated sediments along China's coast. However, with the crucial progress of weight of evidence (WOE) approach in both logic and practice, this approach is getting available to be applied in the sediment quality assessment of our coastal ecosystem. By incorporating the levels of evidences such as sediment chemistry, toxicity and benthic community ecology, WOE forms an integrated approach to assess the potential adverse biological effects of environmental stressors mainly toxic substances by reconciling the information from multiple relevant lines of evidences and by weighing the data quality, study design, and other factors, being the sole means currently available to characterize the actual sediment quality and to reach an environmental decision. This paper reviewed the history of sediment quality assessment and the progress of WOE research in coastal sediment, summarized the variety of WOE definitions and interpretive techniques with reliability analysis, and discussed the limitations of WOE in theory and practice. Several improvement suggestions were proposed associated with the prospects of WOE research to advance the coastal sediment quality assessment in China.