Chemical pollutants are omnipresent in the environment and understanding their effects on individuals and populations has occupied researchers for decades. A major challenge in understanding pollutant effects is the variety of other stressors (e.g. infectious diseases, climate change) that organisms and the ecosystems they live in are exposed to.  How do these multiple stressors interact and what is the contribution of pollution in the resulting effects on organisms and populations?

The research performed by our group aims to understand the effects of pollution and multiple other stressors on individuals and populations. Most of the projects under the umbrella of our group focus on bird species (including songbirds, seabirds, shorebirds and raptors), but studies on rodents and Daphnia are also performed. Studies are carried out both in vitro (to elucidate cellular responses to stressors) and in vivo, ranging from laboratory experiments to field studies on wild birds.

Close collaborations with the department of Chemistry at NTNU (Prof. Asimakopoulos) , the University of Antwerp (Prof. Adrian Covaci) and the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (Dr. Dorte Herzke) enable us to prepare and analyse samples for a wide range of organic pollutants (e.g. flame retardants, perfluoroalkyl substances, bisphenols) and metals.

We team up with expert partners at NTNU (Prof. Bjørn Munro Jenssen, Prof. Henrik Jensen, Prof. Sigurd Einum, Em. Prof. Claus Bech), the Norwegian Polar Institute (Prof. Geir Wing Gabrielsen), Nord University (Assoc. Prof. Courtney Waugh), Deakin University (Prof. Marcel Klaassen) and many other international collaborations to better understand multiple stressor effects.

Key areas of research

• Exposure, accumulation and metabolism of emerging compounds in birds.
• Effects of pollutants on birds, including the study at different biological levels of organization.
• Interactions of pollutants and diseases (e.g. avian influenza, avian malaria) in birds.
• The development, validation and employment of non-destructive biomonitoring methods (e.g. feathers, regurgitated pellets).
• Effects of pollution and changes in temperature and food abundance on population dynamics and energy budgets in Daphnia.

Current projects

COAST IMPACT

DISRUPT (external collaborator)

Previous projects

The New Raptor project

Group members

Prof. Veerle Jaspers – Group Leader
I am working as a Professor in Environmental Toxicology at NTNU. My research is oriented towards the interaction of pollution with species-specific ecology, natural stressors and effects on physiology, behaviour and reproduction. I am the project leader of COAST IMPACT, a research project on the combined effects of pollutants and disease on migrating shorebirds along the East-Asian Australian flyway.

Dr. Tomasz Ciesielski – Research Professor
Research professor partly working on the COAST IMPACT project, coordinating field work in Russia, supervising students and providing expertise with elemental analysis and data-analysis of contaminants. He is involved in different research projects with various institutes on exposure and effects of contaminants in the marine environment including recent projects on mine tailings and rare earth elements in coastal areas.

Dr. Laura Monclús - Postdoctoral Fellow
Postdoctoral fellow on PLASTIMPACT project. I am investigating the effects of plastic pollution on birds. My work focusses both on the field, monitoring the impact of plastic on wild species like vultures, and lab, investigating the effects on different biological endpoints by doing lab experiments with Japanese quails.

Dr. Junjie Zhang - Postdoctoral Fellow
Postdoctoral fellow on COAST IMPACT project. My work is to be responsible for the detection and analysis of pollutants, including emerging organic pollutants, such as organophosphate flame retardants, bisphenols and persistent organic pollutants such as perfluorinated compounds, polychlorinated biphenyl.

Anne-Fleur Brand – PhD Candidate
PhD Candidate on the COAST IMPACT project. I investigate the combined influence of pollution and infectious diseases on shorebirds that migrate along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway (EAAF). I am exploring the potential of circulating microRNAs as novel biomarkers for immunomodulation.

Safa Chaabani – PhD Candidate
The aim of my work is to quantify the interactive effects of trophic control and chemical exposure on the life history traits of the model organism Daphnia, at the individual and population levels. Experimental data of the most sensitive life-cycle endpoints of daphnia species, exposed to trophic and chemical stress is generated. This data is then used to feed a Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) model to develop a quantitative framework of the combined effect of multiple stressors on metabolic processes at the individual level. Finally, the results are extrapolated to the population level using Individual Based Models (IBM).

Dr. Essa Khan – Researcher
I am trying to investigate the effect of pollutants on the susceptibility of haemosporidian parasites in the house sparrow (Passer domesticus). The project involves analysing whole blood elements, perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), circulatory miRNAs, parasites of the genera Plasmodium, Haemoproteus, and Leucocytozoon.

Grethe Stavik Eggen – Staff Engineer
Assists the MultiStress group's members in the lab with analyses, equipment, orders and problems that arise. Follow-up and maintenance of the group's facilities.

External

Ingvild Buran Kroglund – Assistant Professor at Nord University
The overall objective of my study is to investigate the presence and concentrations of organic pollutants and toxic elements in an avian top predator, the tawny owl (Strix aluco), in central Norway. Possible effects caused by these pollutants will also be investigated (increased stress hormone levels, cell toxicity and gene expression changes).

Amalie Ask – PhD Candidate at University of Turku
I am examining the potential effects of contaminants on two species of duck, the common eider and the common goldeneye, in the context of their population declines and male-biased adult sex ratios. I will be using untargeted metabolomics, a novel technique in the field of wildlife toxicology.