- Title
- Background concentrations of mercury in Australian freshwater sediments : the effect of catchment characteristics on mercury deposition
- Creator
- Lintern, Anna; Schneider, Larissa; Beck, Kristen; Mariani, Michela; Gell, Peter
- Date
- 2020
- Type
- Text; Journal article
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/176824
- Identifier
- vital:15194
- Identifier
-
https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.019
- Identifier
- ISBN:2325-1026 (ISSN)
- Abstract
- Waterways in the Southern Hemisphere, including on the Australian continent, are facing increasing levels of mercury contamination due to industrialization, agricultural intensification, energy production, urbanization, and mining. Mercury contamination undermines the use of waterways as a source of potable water and also has a deleterious effect on aquatic organisms. When developing management strategies to reduce mercury levels in waterways, it is crucial to set appropriate targets for the mitigation of these contaminated waterways.These mitigation targets could be (1) trigger values or default guideline values provided by water and sediment quality guidelines or (2) background (pre-industrialization) levels of mercury in waterways or sediments. The aims of this study were to (1) quantify the differences between existing environmental guideline values for mercury in freshwater lakes and background mercury concentrations and (2) determine the key factors affecting the spatial differences in background mercury concentrations in freshwater lake systems in Australia. Mercury concentrations were measured in background sediments from 21 lakes in Australia. These data indicate that background mercury concentrations in lake sediments can vary significantly across the continent and are up to nine times lower than current sediment quality guidelines in Australia and New Zealand. This indicates that if waterway managers are aiming to restore systems to ‘pre-industrialization’ mercury levels, it is highly important to quantify the site-specific background mercury concentration. Organic matter and precipitation were the main factors correlating with background mercury concentrations in lake sediments. We also found that the geology of the lake catchment correlates to the background mercury concentration of lake sediments.The highest mercury background concentrations were found in lakes in igneous mafic intrusive regions and the lowest in areas underlain by regolith. Taking into account these findings, we provide a preliminary map of predicted background mercury sediment concentrations across Australia that could be used by waterway managers for determining management targets. Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). **Please note that there are multiple authors for this article therefore only the name of the first 5 including Federation University Australia affiliate “Peter Gell” is provided in this record**
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- Relation
- Elementa Vol. 8, no. 1 (2020), p.
- Rights
- All metadata describing materials held in, or linked to, the repository is freely available under a CC0 licence
- Rights
- http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Rights
- Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Rights
- Open Access
- Subject
- 01 Mathematical Sciences; 02 Physical Sciences; Background conditions; Mercury; Sediment quality guidelines; Waterway management
- Full Text
- Reviewed
- Funder
- This study was funded by a Melbourne School of Engineering Early Career Researcher Grant and by the Australian Research Council (DE180100573).
- Hits: 1009
- Visitors: 1030
- Downloads: 101
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | Published version | 717 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |