Toxics

Sudden tailings dam breaches trigger large-scale heavy metal compound pollution in coupled surface water–groundwater systems, requiring systematic full-cycle ecological damage quantification tools applicable to diverse contamination types. This study constructs an integrated full-cycle ecological damage assessment framework for sudden water pollution accidents, integrating three core modules: multi-model pollutant migration prediction, multi-scale aquatic biological damage diagnosis, and three-dimensional ecological-economic loss accounting. The framework adopts a modular design that can potentially accommodate heavy metals (Cd, Cr, As, Pb) and organic pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), with standardized molecular, individual, and population-level biological endpoints and corresponding pollutant dose–response templates reserved as reference calculation modules. However, applicability beyond this case has not been validated and requires case-specific calibration. To verify the operability and accuracy of the proposed integrated system, a typical tailings dam leakage incident dominated by hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI)) and arsenic (As) pollution was selected as the practical validation case; all field monitoring, pollutant simulation, and final economic loss quantification in this case exclusively rely on on-site measured Cr(VI) and As data, while Cd and PAH-related biological response curves and remediation cost formulas retained in the manuscript only serve as illustrative universal template components of the framework rather than case-measured results. For the Cr(VI)/As pollution case, the advection–diffusion model simulation revealed that the Cr(VI) contamination plume horizontally spread 250 m within 48 h and extended to 560 m after seven days, and anaerobic groundwater environments drove the transformation of toxic mobile trivalent arsenic (As(III)) from primary pentavalent arsenic. The calibrated SWAT model achieved Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) coefficients of 0.75 for dissolved Cr(VI) and 0.68 for particulate As. The graph theory-based rapid prediction model cut computation duration down to minutes; when validated against independent field monitoring data, it yielded an average relative error of 14.2%, and its consistency with the SWAT model reached 10.5% relative deviation, satisfying the accuracy requirement for emergency early warning. Field biological monitoring demonstrated substantial ecological impairment: metallothionein (MT) expression in fish tissues was markedly elevated (the reported 6.2-fold induction value derives from standard Cd exposure template tests within the framework, with analogous MT upregulation also observed for field Cr(VI)/As co-stress), and benthic community Shannon diversity declined by over 50% in polluted river reaches. The standardized Ecological Damage Index (EDI) of the case was calculated as 480.2, indicating severe aquatic ecosystem damage, with total comprehensive ecological and economic losses reaching 17.25 million CNY. This study innovatively couples high-precision physical transport models with fast emergency prediction algorithms and establishes a complete multi-tier biological indicator chain linking molecular biomarkers to community integrity metrics; the three-dimensional loss accounting system integrating ecosystem service impairment, restoration expenditure, and post-pollution recovery loss realizes closed-loop full-cycle damage evaluation. The proposed framework, demonstrated for Cr(VI) and As pollution, has a modular design that may potentially be extended to other pollutants such as Cd and PAHs by adjusting model parameters, providing a quantitative reference for emergency disposal, pollution remediation, and ecological compensation of water contamination accidents, although further validation across different pollutants and hydrological settings is required. Full article