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WESTERN AIRBORNE CONTAMINANTS ASSESSMENT PROJECT RESEARCH PLAN
Citation:
Landers, D H., M. M. Erway, M. Kent, T. Blett, S. Simonich, L. Geiser, C. Schreck, H. E. Taylor, D. H. Campbell, AND D. Jaffe. WESTERN AIRBORNE CONTAMINANTS ASSESSMENT PROJECT RESEARCH PLAN. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-03/035, 2003.
Description:
The goal of the Western Airborne Contaminants Assessment Project (WACAP) is to assess the deposition of airborne contaminants in Western National Parks, providing regional and local information on exposure, accumulation, impacts, and probable sources. This project is being designed and implemented by the National Park Service's Air Resources Division with cooperators from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Geological Survey, and several universities, as well as eight National Parks. The project will take place over a five-year timeline, with the first year (2002) for design and method development work, three years (2003-2004) for field sampling and analysis, and the fifth year (2006) for preparing final databases and interpretive reports. Eight National Parks will participate in WACAP: Sequoia, Rocky Mountain, Olympic, Mt. Rainier, Glacier, Denali, Noatak, and Gates of the Arctic. Two lake catchments have been selected in most of the Parks (Noatak and Gates of the Arctic each have one site), for a total of 14 field sites.
Airborne contaminants can pose serious health threats to wildlife and humans. Some toxic compounds tend to biomagnify, meaning that small concentrations in air, water, snow, and plants can result in large concentrations at higher levels of the food chain, e.g., fish and mammals. Biological effects of airborne contaminants include impacts on reproductive success, growth, behavior, disease, and survival. The contaminants of concern are semi-volatile organic compounds that include PCB, DDT, and current use chemicals such as polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and heavy metals such as mercury. These materials are direct or indirect products of human industrial activity and can be transported thousands of miles in the atmosphere. Some of these contaminants accumulate preferentially in colder areas of the global environment, due to a process called global fractionation. This process causes semi-volatile organic compounds used at warmer temperate latitudes to accumulate at high altitudes and cooler polar latitudes.
WACAP will sample a variety of ecosystem indicators to provide information about contaminant accumulation. These indicators include:? Snow, to measure direct atmospheric loading;
? Fish, to measure food web impacts and bioaccumulation;
? Water, to measure hydrophilic current use chemicals;
? Lake sediment, to provide information about historic trends of contaminant loading to watersheds;
? Lichens, to measure food web impacts and bioaccumulation;
? Willow bark, to measure ecosystem exposure; and
? Subsistence native foods, to measure a food source used by native peoples
Each indicator except for snow will be sampled once at each site. Snow will be sampled annually. A final data base and report will be prepared that should provide evidence of the exposure, historic and seasonal trends, and bioaccumulation of airborne contaminants in the ecosystems of the western national parks.