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Abstract title Our frozen future - conceptual considerations for environmental specimen banks |
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Author Koschorreck, Jan, Umweltbundesamt, Dessau-Roßlau, Germany(P) |
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Co-author(s)
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Keywords
environmental specimen bank, monitoring, REACH, WFD |
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| European environmental specimen banks systematically collect and store specimens of various taxonomic groups from marine, limnic and terrestrial ecosystems. These archives provide overview on the chemical burden along the food web and on its spatial distribution. Key features are highly standardised operation procedures and the potential to generate retrospective time trends for emerging contaminants. Since European ESBs gathered experience over decades and have standardised operation procedures at hand they can provide valuable guidance for industry monitoring efforts.
ESBs’ importance greatly increases with public demand for regulatory safety nets within the REACH process and with international/EU approaches to regulate persistent and bioaccumulating chemicals. In the past ESBs proved to be successful in verifying the effectiveness of legal and voluntary chemicals use retrictions. Today, European ESBs meet the challenge to support risk assessors with reliable information on both, time trends and the biomagnification potential of chemicals. Whereas existing regulatory concepts extrapolate biomagnification from laboratory studies and modelling, ESBs can generate more meaningful information from wildlife, e.g. biomagnification factors. With industry entering the biota monitoring field, reliable time trends as well as standardised and quantitative assessments of biomagnification in wildlife become essential for plausible and transparent risk benefit decisions.
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