Despite advances in toxicity testing and the development of new approach methodologies (NAMs) for hazard assessment, the ecological risk assessment (ERA) framework for terrestrial wildlife (i.e., air‐breathing amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) has remained unchanged for decades. While survival, growth, and reproductive endpoints derived from whole‐animal toxicity tests are central to hazard assessment, nonstandard measures of biological effects at multiple levels of biological organization (e.g., molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, organism, population, community, ecosystem) have the potential to enhance the relevance of prospective and retrospective wildlife ERAs. Other factors (e.g., indirect effects of contaminants on food supplies and infectious disease processes) are influenced by toxicants at individual, population, and community levels, and need to be factored into chemically based risk assessments to enhance the “eco” component of ERAs. Regulatory and logistical challenges often relegate such nonstandard endpoints and indirect effects to postregistration evaluations of pesticides and industrial chemicals and contaminated site evaluations. While NAMs are being developed, to date, their applications in ERAs focused on wildlife have been limited. No single magic tool or model will address all uncertainties in hazard assessment. Modernizing wildlife ERAs will likely entail combinations of laboratory‐ and field‐derived data at multiple levels of biological organization, knowledge collection solutions (e.g., systematic review, adverse outcome pathway frameworks), and inferential methods that facilitate integrations and risk estimations focused on species, populations, interspecific extrapolations, and ecosystem services modeling, with less dependence on whole‐animal data and simple hazard ratios. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2024;20:725–748. © 2023 His Majesty the King in Right of Canada and The Authors. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC). Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada. This article has been contributed to by US Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA. Key Points Characterizations of adverse effects in ecological risk assessments focused on wildlife have generally relied on toxicity data for survival, growth, and reproduction for new chemicals and pesticides. While exposure–response relationships for survival and reproduction will likely remain central to wildlife risk assessment in the near term, other endpoints at many levels of the biological organization have the potential to improve efficiency, reliability, and realism for the longer term. The value of new approach methodologies to ecotoxicological hazard assessment has been acknowledged for some time, but their development seems to have targeted aquatic species and phylogenetically lower forms, and applications for terrestrial wildlife are less apparent. We recommend increased attention to linkages of nonstandard molecular‐ to organism‐level endpoints to effects on wildlife at the population level, as well as to interactions at the community and ecosystem levels with a goal of preventing harmful effects of contaminants on wildlife populations.