Watershed Land Use Is Strongly Linked to PCBs in White Perch in Chesapeake Bay Subestuaries

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• 作者：Ryan S. King ; Joseph R. Beaman ; Dennis F. Whigham ; Anson H. Hines ; Matthew E. Baker ; and Donald E. Weller
• 刊名：Environmental Science & Technology
• 出版年：2004
• 出版时间：December 15, 2004
• 年：2004
• 卷：38
• 期：24
• 页码：6546 - 6552
• 全文大小：323K
• 年卷期：v.38,no.24(December 15, 2004)
• ISSN：1520-5851

文摘

We related total PCBs (t-PCBs) in white perch (Moroneamericana), an abundant estuarine resident that supportsa valuable recreational and commercial fishery in the mid-Atlantic region, to the amount and spatial arrangement ofdeveloped land in watersheds that discharge into 14subestuaries of Chesapeake Bay. We considered theintensity of development in watersheds using four developedland-use measures (% impervious surface, % totaldeveloped land, % high-intensity residential + commercial[%high-res/comm], and % commercial) to representpotential source areas of PCBs to the subestuaries. Wefurther evaluated the importance of source proximity bycalculating three inverse-distance weighted (IDW) metricsof development, an approach that weighted developedland near the shoreline more heavily than developed landfarther away. Unweighted percentages of each of thefour measures of developed land explained 51-69% of thevariance in t-PCBs. However, IDWs markedly improvedthe relationships between % developed land measures andt-PCBs. Percent commercial land, weighted by its simpleinverse distance, explained 99% of the variance in t-PCBs,whereas the other three measures explained as muchas 93-97%. PCBs historically produced or used in commercialand residential areas are apparently persisting in theenvironment at the scale of the watersheds and subestuariesexamined in this study, and developed land close to thesubestuary has the greatest unit effect on t-PCBs in fish.These findings provide compelling evidence for a strikinglystrong linkage between watershed land use and t-PCBsin white perch, and this relationship may prove useful foridentifying unsampled subestuaries with a high risk ofPCB contamination.