Development of an active-passive sampling device for monitoring bioavailable pollutants in water.

Water monitoring programs are largely used to assess the quality of aquatic ecosystems and verify compliance with environmental quality standards. However, the use of inadequate tools for the assessment of the impact of pollutants to aquatic organisms often results in inaccurate evaluations of ecological risk. Current approaches either rely on the total concentration of a pollutant, which has shown to be a poor predictor of ecological risk, or make large use of organisms for biological testing. This proposal aims to create and test a new generation of monitoring devices capable of measuring the fraction of pollutants present in the water that is relevant for ecological risk assessment, that is, the fraction of pollutants effectively available for assimilation in the organism and thus most likely to cause toxicity. An interdisciplinary approach combining biological testing and chemical speciation measurements will be used to investigate mechanistic links between the uptake of organisms and devices and test the performance of the envisaged technology. The automated device will be practical to transport and use on site, and will be equipped with chemical sensors suitable for measuring a wide range of pollutants (e.g. metals and organic compounds). This will significantly reduce costs related to field work operations and laboratory analyses and contribute to more robust and reliable water quality assessments.

Keywords:ECOTOXICOLOGY

Disciplines:Ecology, Environmental science and management, Other environmental sciences