HOME 18-Jul-06
Status on 15^th of July
Passive Sampling Trial Survey of for hydrophobic contaminants Water and Sediment; Including laboaratory intercalibration.
Foppe Smedes, Céline Tixier and Ian Davies (WGMS) and Patrick Roose, Ton van der Zande and Jacek Tronczynski (MCWG)
Participation
Participants were requested to express their intention to participate and fill the forms as soon as possible, but before June 15^th 2006. Confirmation of participation would be given up to 15^th of July. From 12 laboratories in 10 countries a positive response was received, covering 24 samppling stations. This includes Australia. The number of applications was in good agreement with the capacity. On the home page you can find which laboratories will join, provisional information on which items individual laboratories plan and maps of the locations that will be included in the survey. Some labs provide measurements additional to those listed.
At this moment several labs that agreed to participate are still selecting stations and organising participation. Due to holidays it is also not possible to resolve all remaining issues.
Observation and conclusions
Form the application forms received the following information became available	the coordinationgroup suggests
Paricipation	The interest for participation was considered sufficient to continue the preparations for PSTS! See Planning
The inventory of the recovery and internal standards used showed that for PAHs there is no possibility to select Performance Reference Compounds to be added to the passive samplers without interfering with Recovery and Internal Standards used by laboratories.	As there is no set of deuterated PAHs possible as PRC that does not disturbs the analyses of any laboratory it is suggested to leave the choice to the central laboratory. This allows selection of those compounds that suites to their routine procedure. This may reduce the intercalibration to PCBs but will secure the data for survey purposes. More detail will be supplied later.
The exercise had 4 core issues: PS in Water, WaterBiota, PS in Sediment and SedimentBiota, with the Biota either native or deployed. An evaluation of the forms showed that for the SedimentBiota very few laboratories will have possibilities to either collect native speicies at the selected stations or expose worms to sediment.	Inclusion of SedimentBiota will not be a core issue for the PSTS
For the WaterBiota at about 50% of the stations mussels will be deployed or collected	Laboratories that have not planned mussel collection or deployement are invited to reconsider this and try to find ways to include this aspect of the survey. Agreement with colleague laboratories to supply mussels for deployment might be an option to investigate.