Submitted by PBMS Admin on
Members of the PBMS (and colleagues) wrote Chapter 6. 'The role of environmental specimen banks in monitoring environmental contamination' in a recently published Elsevier book Monitoring Environmental Contaminants.
The writing team included PBMS members Jacky Chaplow and Richard Shore, Alex Bond from Natural History Museum Tring, Heinz Rüdel from the German Environmental Specimen Bank and Jan Koschorrek (Federal Environmental Agency, Berlin). The chapter features case studies from the PBMS and NHM Tring that demonstrate the use of both ESB samples and samples held in Natural History museums. The case studies highlight how interrogating specimens in ESBs and natural history collections can identify long-term, large-scale trends in environmental pollution and demonstrate the impact of environmental policies over long timescales. Such assessments would not have been possible without access to the archived samples.
The book Monitoring Environmental Contaminants focuses on a wide range of new technologies and approaches available for monitoring chemical and biological contaminants in air, water, soil and food. These new methods allow the ability to monitor a wider range of contaminants at much greater and temporal resolutions. Adoption of these methods could result in a change in our understanding of how humans and ecosystems are exposed to contaminants in different environmental media.
This volume in the Environmental Contaminants Series provides an overview of a wide range of monitoring approaches ranging from citizen science networks to the use of robotics and sensor networks. Monitoring Environmental Contaminants describes challenges in the adoption of some of these new approaches and methods for dealing with these challenges such as the use of mining techniques for large data. The case studies within will provide a thorough illustration for researchers, academics, and scientists involved in ecology and environmental sciences.
