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AN APPROACH TO PREDICT RISKS TO WILDLIFE POPULATIONS FROM MERCURY AND OTHER STRESSORS
Citation:
Nacci, D E., M Pelletier, J L. Lake, R S. Bennett, J W. Nichols, R Haebler, J Grear, A Kuhn, M. C. Nicholson, AND W R. Munns Jr. AN APPROACH TO PREDICT RISKS TO WILDLIFE POPULATIONS FROM MERCURY AND OTHER STRESSORS. Ecotoxicology. Springer Science+Business Media, 14(1-2):283-293, (2005).
Impact/Purpose:
To predict risks to wildlife from mercury
Description:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL) is developing tools for predicting risks of multiple stressors to wildlife populations, which support the development of risk-based protective criteria. NHEERL's research focuses initially on the risks of dietary methylmercury (CH3Hg) and other stressors to populations of aquatic predators (i.e., common loon, Gavia immer). However, these risks of CH3Hg must be linked with information on the fate of mercury within aquatic food webs to improve understanding of environmental effects produced by atmospherically distributed Hg. To support these needs, relevant existing information (collected by a network of environmental protection-conservation partnerships) is being organized, and focused new studies are being conducted to develop models predicting CH3Hg effects on individuals, and on local and regional scale wildlife populations. Specifically, a biologically-based toxicokinetic model is being used to extrapolate CH3Hg effects from a tested bird species to untested species, including the loon. Population modeling approaches are being used to predict stressor effects on loon populations, and to compare regional populations. Finally, habitat and spatially-explicit population models are being used to integrate results, assess the importance of chemical and non-chemical stressors, and demonstrate the effect of scale on the assessment of risks to wildlife populations.