Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Pollutants are emitted into the atmosphere and hydrosphere primarily from temperate and tropical regions, then transported via atmospheric and oceanic currents, and eventually deposited in arctic environments by global distillation . In some cases, contaminant concentrations in arctic wildlife and humans are sufficiently elevated to impair health, particularly for animals that occupy high trophic levels in the arctic food web, such as polar bears (Ursus maritimus), seabirds, and humans. We have recently shown in our previous research that migratory species are capable of concentrating contaminants to specific target areas, and that these biological vectors are an important and unexplored mechanism for delivering pollutants. Our preliminary survey at Cape Vera on Devon Island showed that seabirds are the principal vectors delivering contaminants to Canadian arctic coastal regions via guano, feathers, and mortality. Our multi-disciplinary team, with complementary expertise in biology, chemistry, limnology, paleolimnology, modeling and ecotoxicology, as well as strong links to government, regulatory and Inuit agencies, will develop tools to assess and predict the impact of seabird populations on contaminants in a coastal Arctic terrestrial ecosystem, identified by Environment Canada as their primary reference site for studying arctic seabird ecology. As seabirds are often the dominant forms of wildlife in many coastal regions, this work will be applicable to a global perspective of contaminant fate in the environment.