Mercury exposure in sedentary and migratory Charadrius plovers distributed widely across China

Assessment of contaminants, health and survival of migratory shorebirds in natural versus artificial wetlands – The potential of wastewater treatment plants as alternative habitats

“…Hargreaves et al (2010) examined 17 different elements present in Arctic-breeding shorebirds and found that Hg was elevated to potentially harmful concentrations. Aside from this study, mercury has also been found to occur in harmful concentrations in Charadrius plovers (Picone et al, 2019;Su et al, 2020), underscoring the need for more extensive pollutant-burden analyses in shorebirds (Ma, Choi, Thomas, & Gibson, 2022). This is especially necessary in shorebirds as they may be more susceptible to pollution due to the physical stresses from migration (Liess, Foit, Knillmann, Schäfer, & Liess, 2016), and their propensity to forage in soft coastal sediments where pollutants can accrue at much higher concentrations than the surrounding water (Stark, 1998).…”

Mercury contamination is an invisible threat to declining migratory shorebirds along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway

“…Limited research for breeding shorebirds has been conducted in Alaska, northern Canada 15,29,30 , and Greenland 31 . Studies on shorebirds during the non-breeding stage have been restricted to only a few common species (e.g., Kentish Plover Charadrius alexandrinus 32,33 ), and key stopover sites such as Delaware Bay in North America 34 and Pertuis Charentais in France 35,36 . The Asia-Pacific region contributes the largest proportion (~49%) of global Hg emissions 37 , which overlaps with sites of many migratory shorebirds along the EAAF 38 .…”