Passive sampling and passive dosing- an innovative approach for the combined chemical and biological analysis of hydrophobic organic pollutants sediment porewater of marine systems

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The proposed project aims at the development of innovative indicators to allow for a spatially structured description and assessment of the pollution and the risk potential of sediment-bound contaminants in marine ecosystems.For the first time the project will obtain toxicity data for the pore water concentrations of hydrophobic organic pollutants with largely reduced uncertainty, directly correlate the results with chemical analysis and verify the findings using artificial mixtures of the target analytes. This will be achieved by adaptation of an in situ equlibrium sampler (passive sampler) based on solid phase microextraction (SPME) for the investigation of hydrophobic organic compounds in marine ecosystems. The PDMS hollow fibers carrying the sampled pollutant mixtures will then be directly applied as passive dosing phases in small-scale biotest systems. As hence no extraction of the fibers is necessary, the risk to alter the original substance composition is significantly reduced. Thus, resulting data are highly representative for the actual pollution on-site. Subsequently, the analysed mixture will be reassembled and tested with concentration series using passive dosing in the test systems to derive concentration-response curves. Together with results on the distribution and accumulation of the contaminants an estimation of the risk due to sediment-bound pollutants will be possible (mixture toxicity).Such realistic toxicity data in combination with knowledge on the distribution of the compounds and correlated with sediment parameters are a good foundation to derive reliable indicators for a good environmental state of Baltic Sea waters.