NEWS In 2022, Arctic Centre at Umeå University helped finance a collaborative activity within a research project in Nordic marine ecosystems, led by Professor Emeritus Terry Frank Bidleman. With the funding, the research group hosted a researcher from USA to conduct field work in Abisko and Lake Torneträsk.
Terry Bidleman is a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Chemistry at Umeå University, and Head of the project "Halogenated natural products (HNPs) in Nordic marine ecosystems”. Within the research project, he initiated a project collaboration with Professor Penny Vlahos and her PhD student Emma Shipley from the Department of Marine Sciences at University of Connecticut, USA.
– The objective of the collaboration was to investigate sources and transport pathways of selected Halogenated Natural Products (HNPs) in Lake Torneträsk on the border of Abisko National Park in Sweden. The HNPs studied were bromine-containing compounds produced in oceans and seas by algae and bacteria, and chlorinated compounds produced by terrestrial fungi.
Emma Shipley, PhD Student at University of Connecticut, USA.
Image Terry BidlemanFunding from the Arctic Centre and EcoChange supported PhD student Emma Shipley to travel and stay at the Abisko field station and made it possible for her to collect water samples from lake Torneträsk and adjoining streams. Parallel samples were also obtained by the Umeå team of Bidleman, Kathleen Agosta and Mats Tysklind.
The research results from Lake Torneträsk were compared to similar measurements in the rivers and estuaries Västerbotten County and have furthered our investigations of HNPs in Northern Sweden.
Bidleman says that the collaborative field work was very beneficial in several respects.
– We established collaboration with Professor Vlahos at University of Connecticut, which we intend to continue. The research results from Lake Torneträsk were compared to similar measurements in the rivers and estuaries of Västerbotten County and have furthered our investigations of HNPs in Northern Sweden. The outcome so far has been one publication and several presentations.
Bidleman explains how HNPs can help us understand exchanges between land, sea and air in the river system that dominates the Bothnia Bay.
– Bothnia Bay has a food web that is shifting from phytoplankton to heterotrophic bacteria that feed on the organic material transported along the rivers. The overall picture of HNPs’ transport and exchange can be summarized by “What goes around, comes around”, because they volatilize from sea and land, disperse through the atmosphere, and return via precipitation and rivers. HNPs enable us therefore to follow exchanges between land, rivers, sea and air, and we see this clearly in the results that distinguish land- and sea-derived compounds along the Bothnia Bay coast and at Lake Torneträsk.
Bidleman also mentions how the results could be useful for future work.
– Although the studied HNPs are not pollutants, they have been found in fish. Extensions of this work would be to use HNPs to follow differences in bioaccumulation from the rivers to the coastal zone, examine relationships between HNPs and the organic matter that feeds bacteria, and monitor how HNP levels respond to changing climate.
