Tracking pan-continental trends in environmental contamination using sentinel raptors—what types of samples should we use?
Résumé
Biomonitoring using birds of prey as sentinelspecies has been mooted as a way to evaluate the success ofEuropean Union directives that are designed to protectpeople and the environment across Europe from industrialcontaminants and pesticides. No such pan-European evaluation currently exists. Coordination of such large scalemonitoring would require harmonisation across multiplecountries of the types of samples collected and analysedmatrices vary in the ease with which they can be collected and the information they provide. We report the first everpan-European assessment of which raptor samples arecollected across Europe and review their suitability forbiomonitoring. Currently, some 182 monitoring programmes across 33 European countries collect a variety ofraptor samples, and we discuss the relative merits of eachfor monitoring current priority and emerging compounds.Of the matrices collected, blood and liver are used mostextensively for quantifying trends in recent and longerterm contaminant exposure, respectively. These matricesare potentially the most effective for pan-European biomonitoring but are not so widely and frequently collected as others. We found that failed eggs and feathersare the most widely collected samples. Because of thisubiquity, they may provide the best opportunities forwidescale biomonitoring, although neither is suitable for allcompounds. We advocate piloting pan-European monitoring of selected priority compounds using these matricesand developing read-across approaches to accommodateany effects that trophic pathway and species differences inaccumulation may have on our ability to track environmental trends in contaminants.
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