F |
| FAO | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. |
| Fate and Exposure Modeling | The scientific process used to predict where chemicals "end up" after being released into the environment. For example: a chemical may be emitted into the air, but most of it might end up in groundwater, because of the chemical's particular physical properties. |
| Fertility | Ability to conceive and to produce offspring: for litter- bearing species the number of offspring per litter is used as a measure of fertility. Reduced fertility is sometimes referred to as sub-fertility. |
| Fertility toxicant | Produces abnormalities of male or female reproductive functions or impairs reproductive capacity. |
| Field (matrix) spike | A sample prepared at the sampling point (i.e., in the field) by adding a known mass of the target analyte to a specified amount of the sample. Field matrix spikes are used, for example, to determine the effect of the sample preservation, shipment, storage, and preparation on analyte recovery efficiency (the analytical bias). |
| Field blank | A QA/QC sample used to indicate potential contamination from ambient air and sampling instruments. A blank used to provide information about contaminants that may be introduced during sample collection, storage, and transport. A clean sample, carried to the sampling site, exposed to sampling conditions, returned to the laboratory, and treated as an environmental sample. |
| Field split samples | Two or more representative portions taken from the same sample and submitted for analysis to different laboratories to estimate inter-laboratory precision. |
| File Work Instructions (WFIs) | A file plan lists the records in your office, and describes how they are organized and maintained. |
| Food Chain | A sequence of organisms, each of which uses the next, lower member of the sequence as a food source. |
| Food web | Network of food chains - The feeding relationships by which energy and nutrients are transferred from one species to another. |
