Data and code for Tarandek et al. 2026: Fitness costs of environmentally relevant concentrations of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in freshwater fauna: a systematic review and meta-analysis

This repository contains the screening process, data and code used for the systematic review and meta-analysis of PPCP effects at environmentally relevant concentrations across freshwater taxa. The provided materials allow full reproduction of literature screening, data processing, effect size calculation, multilevel meta-analyses, meta-regressions and all figures presented in the manuscript and supplementary information. Additionally, this repository includes policy citation datasets linking included studies to policy and regulatory documents identified in Altmetric and Overton databases. Our objectives were to quantify the overall effects of PPCP exposures on fitness of freshwater fauna, and to test how the effects vary across taxa, and with developmental stage, sex, and experimental context. We synthetised data from 96 peer-reviewed experimental studies and open datasets spanning 28 species and 65 PPCP compounds. Our meta-analysis shows that exposure to environmental levels of PPCPs consistently reduced fitness componenets, with survival showing the strongest decline. Among compound groups, pharmaceuticals—and particularly antibiotics—produced the largest effects. However, the responses were context dependent. Our synthesis also revealed a substantial gap in taxonomic and compound coverage. We found little statistical evidence of publication biases in our dataset and the results were robust to sensitivity analyses.