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Practical advice for selecting or determining trophic magnification factors for application under the European Union Water Framework Directive
Citation:
Kidd, K., L. Burkhard, M. Babut, K. Borga, D. Muir, O. Perceval, H. Ruedel, K. Woodburn, AND M. Embry. Practical advice for selecting or determining trophic magnification factors for application under the European Union Water Framework Directive. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management. Allen Press, Inc., Lawrence, KS, 15(2):266-277, (2019). https://doi.org/10.1002/ieam.4102
Impact/Purpose:
The paper outlines a methodology for selecting a Trophic Magnification Factor (TMF) from available data for application in the European Union. The methodology contains a flowchart and methodology walks the user through a series of hierarchal tiers starting with the most preferred and descending through less desirable/lower quality TMFs. The flowchart methodology is new. The paper is precedent setting for TMF selection because no other methodologies exist for selecting a TMF; the methodology is the first of its kind. TMFs are expressions of biomagnification potential within food webs and in the European Union, TMFs will be used to adjust chemical residues from the species collected by their contaminant monitoring programs to species consumed by humans and higher trophic level species, e.g., birds and mammals.
Description:
European Union Directive 2013/39/EU, which amended and updated the Water Framework Directive (WFD; 2000/60/EC) and its Daughter Directive (2008/105/EC), sets Environmental Quality Standards for biota (EQSbiota) for a number of bioaccumulative chemicals. These chemicals pose a threat to both aquatic wildlife and human health via the consumption of contaminated prey or the intake of contaminated food originating from the aquatic environment. EU Member States will need to establish programs to monitor the concentration of 11 priority substances in biota and assess compliance against these new standards for the classification of surface water bodies. An EU-wide guidance effectively addresses the implementation of EQSbiota. Flexibility is allowed in the choice of target species used for monitoring because of the diversity of both habitats and aquatic community composition across Europe. According to that guidance, the consistency and comparability of monitoring data across Member States should be enhanced by adjusting the data on biota contaminant concentrations to a standard trophic level using the appropriate trophic magnification factor (TMF), a metric of contaminant biomagnification through the food web. In this context, the selection of a TMF value for a given substance is a critical issue, since this field-derived measure of trophic magnification can show variability related to the characteristics of ecosystems, the biology and ecology of organisms, the experimental design, and the statistical methods used for TMF calculation. This paper provides general practical advice and guidance for the selection or determination of TMFs for reliable application within the context of the WFD (i.e., adjustment of monitoring data and EQS derivation). Based on a series of quality attributes for TMFs, a decision tree is presented to help end users select the “most reasonable” TMF.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Practical advice for selecting or determining trophic magnification factors for application under the European Union Water Framework Directive