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Tracking Mercury in Air, Water, Land, Fish and Wildlife

Mercury concentrations in fish and wildlife in the United States routinely exceed human and wildlife health thresholds. Scientists must rely on limited information to understand and quantify the links between mercury emissions, environmental response, and potential human health concerns. Solutions to the mercury pollution problem require standardized and comprehensive long-term information—information that is currently not available.

MercNet is a proposed comprehensive long-term mercury monitoring program focused on ambient concentrations, mercury deposition, watershed cycling, and biological effects. It would provide answers to critical environmental policy questions, such as:

• Are mercury emissions and deposition to the environment changing as a result of current policies and programs?
• Are further emissions reductions necessary?
• Are ecosystems responding to changes in mercury pollution?
• Have fish tissue concentrations changed sufficiently to revise fish consumption advisories?
• What human and wildlife populations continue to be at risk due to high concentrations of mercury in fish?
• How much are threatened and endangered species impacted by mercury pollution?

The EPA, along with other agencies, tribes, universities, and research and environmental organizations, are collaborating to establish a national, policy-relevant network that measures mercury in the atmosphere, land, water, and biota in terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal ecosystems. Considerable progress has been made in the design of this national mercury monitoring program. In 2003, scientists from across the U.S. and several other countries gathered in an EPA-sponsored workshop convened by the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) to devise a national mercury monitoring program. Detailed recommendations from this workshop were published in Mason et al. (2005) and a subsequent book by Harris et al. (2007).

The May 2008 National Mercury Monitoring Workshop was an important step in building broad community support for a comprehensive, integrated monitoring network. Canadian and U.S. scientists made great headway at the meeting, including:

• Agreeing on the overall goal of the network
• Considering a conceptual framework of monitoring sites
• Agreeing on several monitoring design elements.

From the workshop, a final report was developed detailing the conceptual designs and strategies for implementation.

GEOGRAPHIC FOCUS

MercNet would be a national mercury monitoring network, with monitoring sites throughout the United States. Proposed intensive monitoring sites are shown below:

MercNet Monitoring Inventory

Since the initial gathering at SETAC in 2003 and the 2008 workshop, BRI has been able to initially implement a database design to house historic and current mercury samples from biota, water, sediment, and air.  The parameters in MercNet allow for specific queries to obtain information pertinent to targeted studies.

Currently BRI hosts the meta-database online for MercNet allowing users to explore the database using search options. Depending on the source data, users may directly download the mercury data or submit a request through BRI using the MercNet data request form. While BRI hosts and stores many unique and comprehensive mercury data sets, the transformation and inclusion of data in the comprehensive MercNet catalog has been focused on the Great Lakes region. As BRI moves forward with our mercury research, we plan to incorporate more national and state datasets into the all inclusive catalog.

To search the database and explore mercury data across the US, go to our specific MercNet online data library.

COLLABORATORS

The 2008 workshop in Annapolis included MercNet participants from federal agencies (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Geological Survey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service), state and tribal agency representatives, NADP, industry, and scientists from academic and private research institutions. The current national monitoring program, the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP), also has a large membership of organizations that are collaborating to establish a coordinated network for monitoring mercury in the atmosphere. For more information, please see the NADP website.

CONTACTS

• Madeline Turnquist, Biodiversity Research Institute
• David Evers, Ph.D., Biodiversity Research Institute

Recent Media And Reports

PUBLICATIONS

• MercNet Brochure

   

• EPA MercNet 2008 Workshop Report

   

• Mason, R.P., Abbott, M.L., Bodaly, R.A., Bullock, O. R. Jr., Evers, D.C., Lindberg, S.E., Murray, M., Swain, E.B., Driscoll, C.T. 2005. Monitoring the response to changing mercury. Environmental Science & Technology39(1): 14A-22A.

   

• Schmeltz et al - MercNet: a national monitoring network to assess responses to changing mercury emissions in the United States
• Harris, R., Krabbenhoft, D.P., Mason, R., Murray, M.W., Reash, R., Saltman, T. 2007. Ecosystem Responses to Mercury Contamination: Indicators of Change. CRC Press. 216 pp.