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LINKING BIOACCUMULATED MERCURY AND WILDLIFE POPULATION EFFECTS
Citation:
Nacci, D E. AND M Pelletier. LINKING BIOACCUMULATED MERCURY AND WILDLIFE POPULATION EFFECTS. Presented at Northeast Research Cooperative Mercury Database Workshop, Portland, ME, November 27-28, 2001.
Description:
As part of the Office of Research and Development, National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Atlantic Ecology Division (AED, Narragansett, RI) is developing methods to assess the risks of anthropogenic stressors to wildlife populations. AED is focusing currently on the development and evaluation of tools to estimate the relative risks of mercury and other stressors to loons and other piscivorous bird populations. This specific project was identified because it could take advantage of a rich collection of data, address a problem of immediate concern to the Agency, and provide a focus for the development of approaches and tools for assessing the risks of multiple stressors to populations of wildlife in general, leading to the development of risk-based criteria. Three major objectives associated with this research include: (1) development of mechanistically-based approaches for extrapolating toxicological data across wildlife species; (2) development of approaches for predicting population-level responses to stressors; and (3) development of approaches for evaluating the relative risks from chemical and non-chemical stressors on spatially structured wildlife populations across large areas or regions. As part of this demonstration project, spatially-explicit models will be developed to project effects of mercury contamination and habitat alteration on the population dynamics of loons. Therefore, it seems most effective that these efforts to predict population effects of environmental stressors be integrated with efforts to predict the fate and bioaccumulation of mercury within aquatic food webs, and ultimately, into loons. To support this research to assess effects of multiple stressors on wildlife populations, AED is developing a geographically-referenced, queriable data base containing information on abiotic and biotic mercury and associated environmental data for the northeast region of the US and Canada. These data have been collected by a multitude of public and private organizations, for a variety of purposes. The approaches for assembling, accessing, and analyzing these data are based upon those used by the EPA's Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program for which data management is also centered at AED (for an example of this data management system, and associated data and meta-data, see www.epa.gov/emap/html/datal/estuary/data/cp9497/index.html). A demonstration database for mercury in media and biota of the northeastern US and Canada has been developed using these principles and is currently under evaluation by AED and potential data contributors and users.