Notice of RetractionMonitoring and Risk Assessment of Representative Organochlorines in Lake Sediment

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

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Concentrations and distribution of 20 organochlorines in the surface sediment of south Taihu Lake were studied and the relevant risk assessment was carried out. The results showed the concentrations of organochlorinated pesticides (OCPs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) detected ranged from 1 to 31 ng·g^-1(dw) and N.D. to 16 ng·g^-1(dw), respectively, which was at a medium contamination level compared to the other fresh water sediments. The congener of CB194 and CB28 was the dominant pollutant among PCBs. Threshold effect concentration (TEC) and probable effect concentration (PEC) were used to evaluate the ecological risk of organochlorines. It was found that 90% of the sampling sites had a dichlorodiphenyltrichloroe thanes (DDTs) value lower than the TEC, and PCBs values of all sites were lower than the TEC. The overall ecological risk of sediment in South Taihu Lake based on the studied organochlorines was low, whereas γ-HCH and HCB may pose a higher risk.