Brominated Flame Retardants: Spatial and Temporal Patterns and Trends in Seabird eggs from the Nearshore Pacific Coast of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Brominated flame retardants (BFRs) have been widely used to reduce fire hazards. One class, the polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), are particularly persistent bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals, now classified as POPs under the Stockholm Convention. Marine ecosystems are the ultimate sink for POPs, and thus there is a continuing need to monitor such contamination. Eggs of marine birds have proven to be an efficient and effective means of measuring and tracking xenobiotic compounds which are transferred from the female bird to the egg via yolk lipids or proteins. Here we report and discuss data from long term monitoring of and mercury in seabird eggs from the northeast Pacific. For this program, the marine system was divided, and representative species selected. The nearshore subsurface is monitored using two cormorant, Phalacrocorax, species, auritus and pelagicus, both feed on a variety of benthic and pelagic fish. The inshore and estuarine zone is monitored using the great blue heron, Adea Herodias. Nearshore data will be compared to data from the offshore subsurface monitored using the rhinoceros auklet, Cerorhinca monocerata, a feeder mainly on small pelagic fishes, and the offshore surface species, the Leach’s storm-petrel, Oceanodroma leucorhoa, which feeds mainly on surface plankton and larval fishes. At three breeding colonies each along the Pacific coast of Canada and at four year intervals 15 eggs are collected and archived. Data from a recent retrospective study, using archived samples collected from 1990 to 2011, shows, as reported for more polluted environments, that PBDEs increased in continental shelf ranging auklet eggs until the early 2000s and have declined since then, in response to restrictions on usage. In contrast, another BFR compound, HBCD (hexabromocyclododecane), increased steadily in eggs of both near and offshore species. The possible role of dietary variation, potentially related to marine regime shifts, will be examined by use of stable isotopes in variation in contaminant levels in these monitored seabirds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".