Evaluation of leaching and extraction procedures for soil and waste

Laboratory leaching tests may be used for source term determination as a basis for risk assessment for soil-groundwater pathways on contaminated sites. In order to evaluate different leaching procedures, batch extraction tests and percolation tests were performed using three reference materials produced from contaminated soil, demolition waste and municipal solid waste incinerator bottom ash. Emphasis was placed on the investigation of the leachability of the heavy metals copper and chromium, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and the anions chloride and sulfate. Significant discrepancies between column experiments and batch/extraction tests were found for the release of PAHs and to a lesser extent for the heavy metals Cu and Cr. Additionally interlaboratory comparisons were conducted based on different leaching tests with the reference materials and evaluated using the criteria of comparability and reproducibility. The best reproducibility was achieved for all investigated substances in column tests. The reproducibility of batch tests was acceptable except for PAHs. The results from the experimental work will help establish standardized and feasible laboratory procedures as fundamental for substance specific risk assessment of contaminated sites.     

Bioaccumulation of perfluoroalkyl acids in dairy cows in a naturally contaminated environment

Beef and dairy products may be important vectors of human exposure to perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs), but the understanding of how PFAAs are accumulated and transferred through agricultural food chains is very limited. Here, the bioaccumulation of PFAAs in dairy cows receiving naturally contaminated feed and drinking water was investigated by conducting a mass balance of PFAAs for a herd of dairy cows in a barn on a typical Swedish dairy farm. It was assumed that the cows were able to reach steady state with their dietary intake of PFAAs. Perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids (PFCAs) with 8 to 12 carbons were detected in cow tissue samples (liver, muscle, and blood) at concentrations up to 130 ng kg^?1. Mass balance calculations demonstrated an agreement between total intake and excretion within a factor of 1.5 and consumption of silage was identified as the dominant intake pathway for all PFAAs. Biomagnification factors (BMFs) were highly tissue and homologue specific. While BMFs of PFOS and PFCAs with 9 and 10 fluorinated carbons in liver ranged from 10 to 20, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) was not biomagnified (BMF?<?1) in any of the investigated tissues. Biotransfer factors (BTFs; defined as the concentration in tissue divided by the total daily intake) were calculated for muscle and milk. Log BTFs ranged from ?1.95 to ?1.15 day kg^?1 with the highest BTF observed for PFOS in muscle. Overall, the results of this study suggest that long-chain PFAAs have a relatively high potential for transfer to milk and beef from the diet of dairy cows. However, a low input of PFAAs to terrestrial systems via atmospheric deposition and low bioavailability of PFAAs in soil limits the amount of PFAAs that enter terrestrial agricultural food chains in background contaminated environments and makes this pathway less important than aquatic exposure pathways. The BTFs estimated here provide a useful tool for predicting human exposure to PFAAs via milk and beef under different contamination scenarios.     

Neues vom Ontong-Java-Plateau (Westpazifik)

For the investigation of climatic history for the last 65 million years, several holes were drilled in 1990 on the Ontong Java Plateau by the drilling vessel Joides Resolution, under the auspices of the international Ocean Drilling Program. The Ontong Java Plateau is the largest basalt plateau on earth, and was formed in the Middle Cretaceous. From the core material, seismic reflectors from the overlying sediments can be associated with specific, climate-related oceanic events. For the cyclic sediments of the last 2 million years, high-resolution isotope curves were generated which depict the two dominant Milankovitch cycles with periods of 100 000 and 41000 years.     

Empirical likelihood confidence intervals for adaptive cluster sampling

Adaptive cluster sampling (ACS) is an efficient sampling design for estimating parameters of rare and clustered populations. It is widely used in ecological research. The modified Hansen-Hurwitz (HH) and Horvitz-Thompson (HT) estimators based on small samples under ACS have often highly skewed distributions. In such situations, confidence intervals based on traditional normal approximation can lead to unsatisfactory results, with poor coverage properties. Christman and Pontius (Biometrics 56:503–510, 2000) showed that bootstrap percentile methods are appropriate for constructing confidence intervals from the HH estimator. But Perez and Pontius (J Stat Comput Simul 76:755–764, 2006) showed that bootstrap confidence intervals from the HT estimator are even worse than the normal approximation confidence intervals. In this article, we consider two pseudo empirical likelihood functions under the ACS design. One leads to the HH estimator and the other leads to a HT type estimator known as the Hájek estimator. Based on these two empirical likelihood functions, we derive confidence intervals for the population mean. Using a simulation study, we show that the confidence intervals obtained from the first EL function perform as good as the bootstrap confidence intervals from the HH estimator but the confidence intervals obtained from the second EL function perform much better than the bootstrap confidence intervals from the HT estimator, in terms of coverage rate.     

Assessing risk and adaptation options to fires and windstorms in European forestry

Risks can generally be described as the combination of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. Using this framework, we evaluated the historical and future development of risk of fire and wind damage in European forestry at the national level. Fire risk is expected to increase, mainly as a consequence of an increase in fire hazard, defined as the Fire Weather Index in summer. Exposure, defined as forest area, is expected to increase slightly as a consequence of active afforestation and abandonment of marginal agricultural areas. Adaptation options to fire risk should therefore aim to decrease the vulnerability, where a change in tree species from conifers to broadleaves had most effect. Risk for wind damage in forests is expected to increase mainly as a consequence of increase in exposure (total growing stock) and vulnerability (defined by age class and tree species distribution). Projections of future wind climate indicate an increase in hazard (storminess) mainly over Western Europe. Adaptation options should aim to limit the increase in exposure and vulnerability. Only an increase in harvest level can stop the current build-up of growing stock, while at the same time it will lower vulnerability through the reduction of the share of old and vulnerable stands. Changing species from conifers to broadleaves helps to reduce vulnerability as well. Lowering vulnerability by decreasing the rotation length is only effective in combination with a high demand for wood. Due to data limitations, no forecast of future fire area or damaged timber amount by storms was possible.