Building Interpretable Machine Learning Models to Identify Chemometric Trends in Seabirds of the North Pacific Ocean.

Marine environmental monitoring efforts often rely on the bioaccumulation of persistent anthropogenic contaminants in organisms to create a spatiotemporal record of the ecosystem. Intercorrelation results from the origin, uptake, and transport of these contaminants throughout the ecosystem and may be affected by organism-specific processes such as biotransformation. Here, we explore trends that machine learning tools reveal about a large, recently released environmental chemistry data set of common anthropogenic pollutants measured in the eggs of five seabird species from the North Pacific Ocean.

Levels and profiles of perfluorinated alkyl acids in liver tissues of birds with different habitat types and trophic levels from an urbanized coastal region of South Korea.

Contamination status and characteristics of perfluorinated alkyl acids (PFAAs) including perfluorinated carboxylic acids (PFCAs) and perfluorinated sulfonic acids (PFSAs) was examined using liver tissue of birds - black-tailed gulls (Larus crassirostris), domestic pigeons (Columba livia var. domestica), pacific loons (Gavia pacifica), herons (Ardea cinerea), and egrets (Egretta garzetta and Ardea alba) - with different trophic levels, habitat types and migratory behaviors from an industrialized coastal region of South Korea. A wide range of PFAAs (1.

Relationship between the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and persistent organic pollutants in sympatric Alaskan seabird ( and ) eggs between 1999 and 2010.

Although climate change occurs alongside other anthropogenic ecosystem impacts, little is known about how sea-surface temperature variability influences the ecotoxicology of persistent organic pollutants (POPs). We analyzed POP contaminant levels, and stable isotopes δN and δC as measures of trophic position, in eggs collected from the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea between 1999 and 2010 from two similar avian species with different trophic positions: common murres (Uria aalge) and thick-billed murres (Uria lomvia). The ebb and flow of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), a long-lived El Niño-like pattern of climate variability in the Pacific Ocean, predicted both trophic position and polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) levels in thick-billed murres, but not in common murres.