The use of spatial modeling in an aquatic food web to estimate exposure and risk

This paper quantitatively evaluates interactions among foraging behavior, habitat preferences, site characteristics and the spatial distribution of contaminants in estimating PCB exposure concentrations for winter flounder at a hypothetical open water dredged material disposal site in the coastal waters of New York and New Jersey (NY–NJ). The models implemented in this study include a spatial submodel to account for spatial and temporal characteristics of fish exposure and a probabilistic adaptation of the Gobas bioaccumulation model to account for temporal variation in concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in sediment and water. We estimated the geographic distribution of an offshore winter flounder subpopulation based on species biology, including such variables as foraging area, habitat size, disposal site size and migration characteristics. We incorporated these variables together with an estimate of differential attraction to a management site within a spatially explicit model to assess the range of expected PCB exposures to a winter flounder population. The output of this modeling effort, flounder PCB tissue concentrations, provides exposure point concentrations for estimates of human health risk through ingestion of locally caught flounder. The risks obtained for the spatially non-explicit case are as much as one order of magnitude higher than those obtained after incorporating spatial and temporal characteristics of winter flounder foraging and seasonal migration. Incorporating spatial and temporal variables in food chain models can help support sediment management decisions by providing a quantitative expression of the confidence in risk estimates.