
How do man-made chemicals accumulate in and affect terrestrial wildlife? TerraChem studies the exposure of top predators and their food chain (rodents, invertebrates, plants and soil) to chemicals and the damage caused to Europe’s terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services. The aim: to facilitate efficient environmental risk assessment and risk management and so reduce harm to wildlife. In this way, TerraChem contributes to achieving the EU’s zero pollution ambition.
TerraChemin short
TerraChem provides an innovative approach to improve the risk assessment and management of chemical pollutants to protect terrestrial biodiversity in Europe.
Chemical pollutants are a key driver of biodiversity loss. Many tens of thousands of harmful man-made chemicals enter the environment and may accumulate in wildlife food chains. Which should we be most concerned about? And what effects might chemical mixtures have on wildlife?
TerraChem aims to better understand exposure of terrestrial biota to man-made chemicals and thus accelerate achievement of the EU’s zero pollution ambition. To achieve this the project has set four objectives.
- Monitoring of chemicals in selected top predators and their food chains across Europe. The latest analytical and data processing methods are used to test large amounts of chemicals per sample and test for mixture effects on key vertebrate metabolic processes.
- Modelling the source-to-receptor pathways of selected chemicals in the terrestrial environment. This way effects on species and genes can be linked to damage to functional diversity and ecosystem services.
- Prevention and mitigation are aided by developing tools for key chemical regulation applications from TerraChem data. These tools help translate the data, prioritizing the most problematic chemicals for risk assessment and risk management.
- Synthesis and data management of the results of the project in a TerraChem data management system, dashboard and early warning system to offer a one-stop shop for data on contaminants in terrestrial European biodiversity.
Whoworks here
Casestudies
Naturalis will study the routes of exposure to chemicals in wildlife, including routes and extent of trophic transfer, for selected food chains in representative terrestrial ecosystems. This will include work to determine chemicals present in the selected food chains, to understand routes of exposure and trophic transfer of chemicals, to explore patterns for individual contaminants and predominant chemical mixtures in terrestrial trophic chains, and to elucidate toxic effects of chemical mixtures in wildlife.
In practice, Naturalis will be running case studies across a range of representative biomes, like farmland, woodland, and grassland, from representative food chains (e.g. bird of prey food chain, carnivorous mammal food chain, insectivorous mammal food chain) in six different countries in Europe, and a pan-European case study on the barn owl food chain (involving at least 6 countries).

Findout more
Find out more about the different aspects of TerraChem by visiting the website:
Or contact the Naturalis' project leader Paola Movalli.
- TerraChem is building further on the research project called "LIFE APEX," which examined the systematic use of contaminant data from apex predators and their prey in chemicals management.
- TerraChem is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
