Development and testing of a new bioenergetic/bioaccumulation model for persistent organic pollutants in aquatic and terrestrial food webs

This project developed and tested a bioenergetic/bioaccumulation model to predict concentrations, bioconcentration factors, bioaccumulation factors (BAF) and trophic magnification factors of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in organisms in terrestrial and aquatic food webs. This is the first bioaccumulation model that conserves both mass of chemical and energy. This model was tested against concentrations of various POPs in wildlife of Canadian Arctic terrestrial and Lake Ontario aquatic food webs. The model is shown to predict BAFs of POPs in organisms that are in good agreement with observed BAFs as indicated by the model bias, which ranged from 0.62 to 5.31. A comparison of the behaviour of the new model to that of a previous aquatic BAF model by Arnot and Gobas (2004) shows that the models are comparable in their ability to predict BAFs. The model can be used for bioaccumulation screening of chemicals in both aquatic and terrestrial animals.