Contribution of Passive Sampling Devices on the Determination of Hydrophobic Organic Contaminant Bioaccumulation in Marine Organisms

Abstract

Hydrophobic Organic Contaminants (HOC) are a group of chemicals needed to determine the health of marine ecosystems, and passive sampling devices are promising tools that offer a convenient monitoring opportunity. Traditional biomonitoring studies involved different types of marine organisms, and it appeared that simultaneous deployment of passive samplers with biomonitoring organisms provided the necessary information for the calculation of the aquatic organisms’ bioaccumulation factors (BAF). There was not any other parameter than BAF, that could be used to determine the biomagnification and fate of contaminants in the upper trophic levels, which eventually affect all marine and terrestrial ecosystem health. In the light of the essence of BAF, this study applied a modified version of BAF estimation dependent on the contaminant concentrations both in the passive and active samplers. Thus, BAF parameters could be calculated properly without any need of a contaminant concentration in the surrounding water environment. For this purpose, the HOC concentration detected from the anthropogenic settlements in the coastal regions of Turkey were collocated, evaluated, and represented for different HOC groups. It was concluded that the present method is appropriate and applicable for BAF calculations of different groups of HOCs, where there are simultaneous deployments of both active and passive samplers in the process of biomonitoring studies.