Developing Assessment Tools and Criteria for Integrative Chemical and Biological Effects Monitoring

Project overview

Project period: 2025 - 2028

Participating departments from the museum: Department of Environmental Monitoring and Research

Project description

The Baltic Sea, including the Swedish coast, is one of the worlds most polluted seas. A robust framework is necessary to track the consequences of contamination on the environment. European requirements for monitoring are outlined in the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) that regulates monitoring in fresh water and coastal areas and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) that regulates marine monitoring.

Swedish coastal monitoring has annual monitoring of both contaminants and analysis of effects of chemicals on biological systems using biological effect markers. While these two approaches have been running in parallel for decades, there have been few attempts at integrating the monitoring data.

Our aim with the project is to use already collected data, supplemented with a case study, to develop assessment criteria for biological effect markers and new tools for integrating assessments of contaminant and biological effect markers to give an overall status of the marine environment.

This will be a cornerstone for future strategies in environment risk assessments that will be used to evaluate coastal marine areas for good environmental status (GES). This will be used in Swedish monitoring but the framework will also be harmonized with monitoring activities within the EU and MSFD to support contaminant status assessment in European marine waters.