Tracking pan-continental trends in environmental contamination using sentinel raptors—what types of samples should we use?
Abstract
Biomonitoring using birds of prey as sentinel
species has been mooted as a way to evaluate the success of
European Union directives that are designed to protect
people and the environment across Europe from industrial
contaminants and pesticides. No such pan-European evaluation currently exists. Coordination of such large scale
monitoring would require harmonisation across multiple
countries 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 ever
pan-European assessment of which raptor samples are
collected across Europe and review their suitability for
biomonitoring. Currently, some 182 monitoring programmes across 33 European countries collect a variety of
raptor samples, and we discuss the relative merits of each
for monitoring current priority and emerging compounds.
Of the matrices collected, blood and liver are used most
extensively for quantifying trends in recent and longerterm contaminant exposure, respectively. These matrices
are potentially the most effective for pan-European biomonitoring but are not so widely and frequently collected as others. We found that failed eggs and feathers
are the most widely collected samples. Because of this
ubiquity, they may provide the best opportunities for
widescale biomonitoring, although neither is suitable for all
compounds. We advocate piloting pan-European monitoring of selected priority compounds using these matrices
and developing read-across approaches to accommodate
any effects that trophic pathway and species differences in
accumulation may have on our ability to track environmental trends in contaminants.