LAUSR

Indigenous Arctic populations experience elevated exposures to many environmental contaminants compared with groups residing in southern Canada. This is largely due to consumption of traditional foods, some of which (ringed seals, beluga whales, narwhals, etc.) have relatively high concentrations of persistent organic pollutants. Models of contaminant fate, transport, and bioaccumulation represent powerful tools to explore this exposure issue, wherein combined models can be used to mechanistically and dynamically describe the entire sequence of events linking chemical emissions into the environment to ultimate contaminant concentrations in indigenous Arctic populations. In this review, various approaches adapted and applied to understanding indigenous Arctic contaminant exposure are explored, including early models describing body burdens in single traditional food species to more recent approaches holistically examining uptake and bioaccumulation in entire food chains. The applications of these models ar...