Projects / Programmes
Biological methods for monitoring mercury hot spots
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 1.03.00 |
Natural sciences and mathematics |
Biology |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| B260 |
Biomedical sciences |
Hydrobiology, marine biology, aquatic ecology, limnology |
mercury, battery of biological methods, hot spots, early warning system, toxicity
Researchers (14)
Organisations (2)
Abstract
Centuries of mercury mining in Idrija have caused highly elevated levels in all natural compartments with severe impacts on human health and ecosystems, environment and limitations to land use and marine culture. A lack of agreed measurement strategies on which modelling tools and sound decisions on most appropriate remediation actions can be based, was identified as one of the major gaps (ICMGP, UNEP). The Slovenian position is, that there is an urgent need to develop a complete set of biological, chemical and physical measurement strategies to support the development of predictive models that can be used in early warning system in Hg contaminated areas (MOP).
The overall poject objective is to provide a set of relevant biological methods for the identification, monitoring and »early warning« of existant or potential mercury mobilisation hot spots to aquatic environments, which will also be applied as for assessing Hg bioavailability and for studying the uptake, transformations and toxicity of different Hg species to living beings.
To reach the objectives, we will include integrated biological (molecular, toxicological, physiological, structural, population, community) and chemical measurements. Speciation-specific reference measurements and targeted mode-of-action analysis will be the basis of experimental design for methods comparability and quality control.
Relevant scientific results in the field of mercury research can only be achieved by joint efforts of an interdisciplinary consortium of research groups. In our proposal, four groups (already collaborating in methods development, two of them also in the Centre of Excellence Environmental Technologies) will integrate biological and chemical approaches to mercury monitoring.
Major challenges that also represent major innovations include the identification of species that represent sufficiently well the overall community in the field, the characterization of relevant species-specific responses to chemical (and non-chemical) stress, the control of exposure-confounding factors such as pH, water hardness, DOC as well as Hg speciation, and appropriate schemes to normalize contaminant concentrations to bioavailable fractions as well as effective concentrations to standard conditions.
