It is now well admitted that a battery of ecotoxicity tests should be designed by accounting for the requirements of a specific scenario such as classification of wastes or remediation efficiency of contaminated soils. The development of a single battery of tests for all applications is thereafter recognized not to be relevant. The selection of tests for constituting a battery may be established according to expert judgments, decision criteria such as cost, ecological relevance, sensitivity of selected organisms, standardization of the methods, implementation of the test protocols or after statistical analysis of test results obtained on a large series of bioassays. In this chapter, a methodological framework, based on the combination of an original multicriteria method called SIRIS and multivariate analyses, is presented for selecting ecotoxicity tests for assessing the level of contamination of soils. The interest of this approach that simultaneously accounts for ecological, technical, and economical constraints is discussed.
