Articles citing this paper

Dr Thomas A. Douglas has worked as a geochemist at the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Fairbanks, Alaska since 2001. He uses geochemical tracers to investigate environmental processes occurring in the snow pack, on sea ice, and in watersheds containing permafrost. Recent projects have focussed on the interactions between atmospheric chemical compounds, like mercury, and the snow surface and measurements of the chemical composition of permafrost ice features. He also has ongoing projects focussed on predicting the response of permafrost to climate warming and the potential release of carbon from permafrost soils.

Dr Lisa L. Loseto is an Arctic marine ecologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Winnipeg. Her research focuses on characterising beluga health, habitat use, diet and contaminant exposure in context with surrounding ecosystem drivers. Her research programs are carried out in close partnership with northern communities and co-management boards to address ecosystem health and resource management questions. She uses biomarkers such as fatty acids to define ecosystem structure and connectivity from which to construct a baseline food web and consider responses to stressors or impacts such as climate change, contaminants and industrial activity.

Dr Robie Macdonald is a geochemical oceanographer with Fisheries and Oceans Canada specialising in ocean pathways. His interests include the organic carbon cycle, the hydrological cycle, climate change and contaminant pathways in the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. He directs interdisciplinary programs to study the environmental pathways of contaminants, including their delivery, transport and elimination from aquatic systems. He determines the behaviour of contaminants in the context of natural systems bringing to bear such tools as water-mass analysis, transient and steady state tracers, stable isotope analyses (oxygen, carbon and lead), the determination of particle fluxes and sedimentation rates, multivariate statistics and modelling.

Peter Outridge is a biogeochemist working on trace metals in the environment. His particular research interests are sedimentary metal chemistry, lead isotopes as tracers, mercury in polar regions, and the impacts of climate change on environmental metal dynamics and fate. He is co-chair of the Mercury Experts Group for the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, an inter-governmental agency concerned with contaminants in the Arctic.

Dr A. Dommergue has worked as a chemist at the Lab of Glaciology in Grenoble, France. He is also a teacher at the Université Joseph Fourier – Grenoble 1 since 2006. He studies the fate of mercury in polar snowpacks but he is also involved in retrieving the past atmospheric patterns of mercury using snow and firn air archives. He is also involved in the atmospheric monitoring program (GMOS Global Mercury Observation System) and he is in charge of two monitoring sites in Antarctica and a third one in the Indian Ocean (Amsterdam Island).

Dr Alexandre Poulain’s research interests lie at the intersection of biogeochemistry, molecular biology and microbiology, using combined field and lab-based approaches. He is particularly interested in unravelling complex biogeochemical transformations at the interfaces of water, ice, snow, soil and air, and understanding the role of microbes in these processes. His laboratory develops and uses molecular biology and bacterial tools to track the mobility and toxicity of contaminants in the environment and to evaluate how environmental stressors affect microbial communities. The primary goal of his work is to provide data to improve models predicting the fate and toxicity of contaminants in the environment. He has been involved in remote, Northern and Arctic research for 9 years.

Dr Marc Amyot is full professor and chair of the department of biological sciences at Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada. He has worked on mercury cycling in Arctic aquatic systems since 1995. His laboratory has studied the biological and photochemical redox transformations of Hg in water and snow. More recently, he has conducted studies on thaw ponds as sites of Hg methylation in the Eastern Canadian Arctic, and on the importance of photodemethylation of methylmercury in these ponds. He has also investigated the trophic transfer of mercury in Arctic food webs in the changing North.

Dr Tamar Barkay, a professor at Rutgers University, NJ, since 1999, has studied the microbiology of the mercury cycle for over 35 years. Her lab uses microbiological, environmental, and molecular tools to study the mechanisms by which microbes transform mercury and to define their role in the speciation and distribution of mercury in various environments. On-going projects examine the potential contribution of mercury reduction by Arctic bacteria to the formation of elemental mercury in Arctic environments, pathways of methylmercury formation in Northern wetland ecosystems and how these are affected by global warming and mercury biogeochemistry in Yellowstone National Park.

Prof Torunn Berg has been a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology since 2006. She was a Ph.D. student, scientist and senior scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU) from 1988 to 2009. She is responsible for the Norwegian mercury speciation measurements at the Zeppelin station as well as flux measurements at Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. Her interest is also related to trace metals in precipitation-air and biomonitor mosses.

Dr John Chételat is an aquatic ecologist that studies the fate of mercury in freshwater ecosystems. His research focuses on how environmental, biological and ecological processes affect the uptake and biomagnification of mercury in aquatic food webs. Currently, Dr Chételat is a Research Scientist with Environment Canada at the National Wildlife Research Centre in Ottawa, Canada.

Dr Philippe Constant did his Ph.D. (2004–08) under the supervision of Dr Richard Villemur (INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier; INRS-IAF) and Dr Laurier Poissant (Environment Canada) studying the biogeochemical processes of mercury and molecular hydrogen in temperate and subarctic ecosystems. After a postdoctoral fellow (2008–11) in the research group of Dr Ralf Conrad (Max Plank Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology), he joined the INRS-IAF as an assistant professor. He is currently investigating the interactions between soil microorganisms scavenging climate relevant atmospheric trace gases (e.g. H₂, CO) and those catalyzing other globally important biogeochemical processes in soil, such as carbon and nitrogen turnover.

Marlene Evans is a Research Scientist at Environment Canada’s National Hydrology Research Centre in Saskatoon. In northern Canada, she is investigating contaminant trends in Great Slave Lake burbot and lake trout; sea-run char at two coastal communities; and contributing to landlocked char and ringed seal studies. In the Prairie Provinces, she is investigating mercury biomagnification rates in warm-water food webs (pike) and leading the temporal chapter assessing Canada-wide trends in mercury deposition in lakes and concentrations in biota. She is contributing to studies around Alberta’s oil sands, focussing on mercury trends in fish and metals and PAHs in sediments.

Christophe Ferrari has been Professor at University of Grenoble (France) since 2004 and a researcher at the Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l’Environnement (CNRS/UJF) since 1996 as assistant Professor. He has been since 2003 junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). He has been a chemist working on heavy metals in the environment and especially mercury in polar and alpine regions. His main focus has been to better understand methylation pathways in pristine regions and also to better understand mercury pathways from atmospheric deposition to contamination of polar ecosystems.

Dr Nikolaus Gantner is an Ecotoxicologist currently appointed as NSERC Banting Fellow and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada. Nikolaus’ research focuses on the transfer of contaminants through aquatic food webs. Past research included the ecological characterisation of Arctic lake food webs using stable isotopes and parallel analysis of mercury and mercury isotopes, with the goal to better understand the transfer of mercury and potential for isotope fractionation in food webs. In his ongoing research, Nikolaus incorporates knowledge from multiple disciplines to address challenging environmental issues using a collaborative approach.

Matthew S. Johnson is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen. He teaches courses on environmental chemistry, physical and quantum chemistry, and scientific writing. His main research interest is atmospheric chemistry, including kinetics and spectroscopy, and stable isotopes in atmospheric trace gases. He is a co-author of more than 70 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He has invented and patented a method for efficient emissions control and improving building energy efficiency. He has worked as a researcher for Honeywell and Medtronic and has research collaborations with groups around the world, including Ford Motor Company and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Jane Kirk is an Environment Canada Research Scientist at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. She completed her Ph.D. in Environmental Biology and Ecology in 2009 from the University of Alberta. Jane’s research examines the natural biogeochemical cycling of elements in the environment and human disruptions to these cycles. Jane is currently examining the transport and fate of mercury in Canadian temperate and Arctic ecosystems to try to understand why concentrations of methyl mercury, the toxic and bioaccumulative form of mercury, are so high in freshwater fishes and marine mammals.

Dr Niels Kroer is Head of the Department of Environmental Sciences at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research is focussed on the activity, functional diversity and evolution of natural microbial communities. Specifically, his expertise includes bacterial nutrient cycling, measurements of in situ microbial activity, environmental factors affecting the rate of horizontal exchange of genetic material between bacteria, and bacterial adaptation to environmental stressors such as mercury. Recent projects have focussed on microbial communities in snow and the role of bacteria in the Arctic Hg cycle.

Dr Catherine Larose is currently working at the Microbial Environmental Genomics Group at the University of Lyon in France. Her environmental genomics (mostly metagenomics) research involves exploring the functional and structural relationships between the environmental genetic resources within Arctic snow ecosystems. High throughput techniques, such as microarrays and pyrosequencing, are used to produce data that supports relevant hypotheses. Much of her current microbial ecology research is on the perturbations of microbial communities and the adaptation of microorganisms to xenobiotic compounds such as mercury.

Dr David Lean is a retired Professor of Ecotoxicology in the Department of Biology at the University of Ottawa. His research is focussed on the effects of toxic substances on living systems including processes that control the chemical transport, fate, persistence and biological accumulation of toxic substances.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1990 in biological oceanography Torkel Gissel Nielsen was employed at the Danish Institute for Fisheries Research. From 1991 he was employed as a marine biologist at National Environmental Research Institute (NERI), department for Marine Ecology and Microbiology, since 1994 as Senior Research Scientist and since 1999 as Research Professor. During the employment at NERI he established extensive research in Arctic biological oceanography with the overall focus on the structure of the arctic pelagic food web and climate impacts on the pelagic food web. Since 2009 he has held a professorship in environmental biological oceanography at National Institute of Aquatic Resources, Technical University of Denmark, working primarily with Arctic biological oceanography leading a group of six M.Sc. and five Ph.D. students.

Dr Laurier Poissant is a retired Senior Scientific Researcher who worked at Environment Canada from 1991 to 2012. His specialty is in investigating the atmospheric processes of contaminants and their interaction with the environment. He has performed research on air-borne mercury and its interaction with northern, aquatic, land and plant environments, on pesticide use in agricultural environments, on the impact of greenhouse gases on St Lawrence and Arctic ecosystems and on contaminant fugacity (water, snow, air, soil, vegetation).

Sigurd Rognerud is a Senior Scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA). His interest is in limnology, especially with regard to contamination of mercury, other heavy metals, and persistent organic pollutants in freshwater ecosystems. Recent projects have focussed on contamination of mercury and other metals in aquatic ecosystems around a large copper–nickel smelter in Subartic Kola Peninsula, Russia. He has also been working with changes in mercury contamination in fish populations following clear cutting of catchments and temporal trends of mercury in lake sediments and fish in Norway.

Since 1993, Prof Henrik Skov has worked as Principal Scientist at the National Environmental Research Institute, now called Department of Environmental Science, Aarhus University, Denmark. He is an atmospheric chemist and for the last 15 years he has been working with the fate of long-range transported pollution to the Arctic. He is responsible for the monitoring station, Station Nord in north-east Greenland. During the last 3 years, he has also been involved in studies of short lived climate forcers. Furthermore, he is Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology and Environmental Technology, University of Southern Denmark.

Professor Søren Sørensen has been the team leader of the Molecular Microbial Ecology Group at the University of Copenhagen since 2008. The main objective of the group’s studies is to evaluate the extent of genetic flow within the natural communities and the responses to environmental perturbations. Molecular techniques such as Q-PCR and pyrosequencing are used to investigate resilience and resistance of community structure in soil. The group has been pioneering in the environmental application of specific whole cell biosensors and other single cell technologies with a focus on flow cytometric analysis. He has co-authored more than 200 scientific papers in international peer reviewed journals, books and presentations at international meetings.

Dr Feiyue Wang is Professor of Environmental Chemistry and Biogeochemistry at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. An aquatic chemist by training, Dr Wang’s research interests extend from molecular-level interactions of metal ions across environmental interfaces to global-scale interactions between chemical contamination and climate change. His recent research has centred on mercury as a global contaminant and as a tracer for other contaminants, and on sea ice geochemistry. Dr Wang leads the Sea–ice Environmental Research Facility (SERF), the first experimental sea ice facility in Canada.

Dr Simon J. Wilson is Deputy Executive Secretary of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) Secretariat, in Oslo, Norway. Based in the Netherlands, he has a background in environmental sciences and trace metal chemistry. His work areas include AMAP data management and communication and outreach, and in particular the development of AMAP science-based information products for policy-makers. His most recent activities involve work on assessments of mercury in the Arctic, and Arctic cryospheric change, and he is currently coordinating project work under and AMAP/UNEP international collaboration to produce an updated global inventory of anthropogenic emissions of mercury to air.

Dr Christian Zdanowicz is a glaciologist with the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa, where he has worked since 1999. He specialises in the study of climate and atmospheric changes in polar and alpine regions through the analysis of glacier cores. Over the past decade, he has conducted extensive work on the long-range transport and deposition of atmospheric contaminants in the Canadian Arctic and the Yukon Territory. His most recent work, conducted under the auspices of the 2007–08 International Polar Year, focussed on the cycling of atmospheric mercury in glaciated catchments of Baffin Island.