Hair

All across Europe soils are contaminated with heavy metals, PCBs and organochlorine pesticides, like DDTs and HCHs. Many heavily polluted soils have been categorized as brownfields, indicating that their destination needs revision. The here presented Interreg IIIB-project faces the challenge to quantify the actual impact of pollution on resident wildlife. The aim of the present project is to provide accurate predictions of the risk of polluted soils to terrestrial organisms. The collected data will be used to develop a user-friendly tool that allows environmental policy and decision makers to redefine the destination of brownfields. Since contemporary risk assessments do not integrate spatial components, like foraging behaviour and micro-spatial variation in soil pollution, they most often lack ecological relevance.

Field studies on terrestrial mammals that integrate exposure, (biochemical) effects as well as data on the individual and population level, are scarce. Furthermore, wildlife toxicology traditionally involves sacrificed animals. However, increasing ethical concerns - especially for mammalian species - gave rise to the need for non-destructive methods. Non-destructive methods involve minimal stress to populations and permit successive biomonitoring of the same populations and individuals. Moreover, they are suited to investigate pollution in endangered species or threatened populations. While non-destructive methods are regularly used in marine mammals, there is no such trend in terrestrial mammalian ecotoxicology.