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Rainer Hoenicke, Daniel Oros, John Oram, and Karen Taberski

Learn how the San Francisco Estuary is tackling the challenge of managing emerging pollutants through monitoring and assessment. Discover the results and future steps in identifying and addressing complex mixtures in environmental samples.

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Rainer Hoenicke, Daniel Oros, John Oram, and Karen Taberski

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  1. Adapting an Ambient Monitoring Program to the Challenge of Managing Emerging Pollutants in the San Francisco Estuary Rainer Hoenicke, Daniel Oros, John Oram, and Karen Taberski

  2. Overview • The Management Challenge • Beginning to Meet the Challenge through Monitoring and Assessment • Result Highlights - for details go to: www.sfei.org) • Future Steps

  3. “Identifying pollutants using our standard approach is like using Peterson’s Guide to North American Birds in the Costa Rican rainforest” Robert Risebrough

  4. Thanks to: • Regional Monitoring Program Participants • RMP Re-design and Exposure and Effects Workgroups

  5. Management Challenge • Potential environmental risks of most pollutant groups have yet to be examined • Current regulatory approaches don’t take interactive, additive, and indirect pollutant/metabolite effects into consideration • Complex mixtures in environmental samples

  6. A Few Statistics • As of 2005, nearly 9 million organic and inorganic substances are commercially available • 240,000 of those are inventoried • A miniscule percentage is regulated in the US.

  7. What is currently managed? • 126 “Priority Pollutants” for which standards exist • A select few additional pollutants in non-systematic fashion • The focus is on a pollutant-by-pollutant approach (e.g., TMDLs)

  8. Adaptations to the Regional Monitoring Program • Retrospective, “forensic” analysis of chromatograms • Expansion of special studies • Targeted measurements of selected additional compounds • New method development

  9. Retrospective Analysis Highlights • most unknown peaks were identified (>90%) • levels ranged from pg/L (ppq) to mg/L (ppb) • contaminants did not exceed lowest LC50 toxicity thresholds for most sensitive aquatic species

  10. Retrospective Analysis of Water and Sediment Samples Resulted in New Target Compounds: PBDEs Phthalates P-Nonylphenol Triphenylphosphate Nitro and Polycyclic Musks

  11. PBDEs Water

  12. PBDEs Sediment

  13. PBDEs Bivalve Tissue

  14. PBDEs in Fish 1997-2002

  15. PBDEs – Least Tern Eggs (She et al., 2004)

  16. New Targeted Compounds

  17. New Targeted Compounds, cont.

  18. Targeted New Compounds, cont.

  19. Targeted New Compounds, cont.

  20. Targeted New Compounds, cont.

  21. Conclusions • The current approach of targeted chemical-by-chemical monitoring cannot anticipate future concerns • Develop more integrative measures and bioassays responsive to multiple stressors • Conduct periodic assessments of compositional change (“fingerprinting”)

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