PH19 Biomonitoring
Exhibit Hall
8:00 AM - Thursday
(PH213) Lessons learned from a comprehensive literature review and development of a database on contaminants in Arctic seabirds.
Vander Pol, S.1, Pugh, R.1, Vander Pol, J.2, Becker, P.1, Ellisor, M.1, 1 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Charleston, SC, USA2 Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Center Charleston, North Charleston, SC, USA
ABSTRACT- The Arctic Seabird Contaminant Database and Annotated Bibliography (ASCODAB) has been created for 39 species and contains over 400 articles with any table containing contaminant information to be included in the searchable database. While other public contaminant databases only give the ability to view concentrations for one datum or set of data at a time, ASCODAB has the functionality to view all the data points or search for data based on criteria such as date, location, species, and contaminant and to export the results to Microsoft Excel for further analyses. Although currently only 1/3 of these articles are entered in the database, some trends are apparent. As expected, Canada and northwestern European countries have conducted the most work on contaminants in Arctic seabirds. Some of the most intensive work has been conducted on herring gulls in the Great Lakes and common murres in Sweden, providing excellent long-term monitoring and trends. Eggs have been examined the most for contaminants, followed by liver and muscle tissues. 
PCBs, mercury, DDE, cadmium, and hexachlorobenzene (HCB) are the primary contaminants that are reported. One of the goals of creating the ASCODAB was the ability to perform time-trend analysis. The major hurdle to this goal is the lack of reporting lipid and moisture content in the analyzed tissue. Reporting percentages of these variables would allow "back of the envelope" calculations for converting wet, dry, and lipid weight measurements. One interesting time trend has been observed for DDE in herring gull (Larus argentatus) eggs, which after declining from its peak in the mid- to late-1970s, appears to be increasing, since about 1990. While the database allows these types of comparisons to be made easily, care must be taken when examining the quality of the data. Different methods, quality assurance, and reporting measures all can affect the results.
Key words: seabird, Arctic, contaminant, database