A harmonized chemical monitoring database for support of exposure assessments

Abstract

Direct monitoring of chemical concentrations in different environmental and biological media is critical to understanding the mechanisms by which human and ecological receptors are exposed to exogenous chemicals. Monitoring data provides evidence of chemical occurrence in different media and can be used to inform exposure assessments. Monitoring data provide required information for parameterization and evaluation of predictive models based on chemical uses, fate and transport, and release or emission processes. Finally, these data are useful in supporting regulatory chemical assessment and decision-making. There are a wide variety of public monitoring data available from existing government programs, historical efforts, public data repositories, and peer-reviewed literature databases. However, these data are difficult to access and analyze in a coordinated manner. Here, data from 20 individual public monitoring data sources were extracted, curated for chemical and medium, and harmonized into a sustainable machine-readable data format for support of exposure assessments.

Fig. 1

MMDB Entity Relationship Diagram. See Supplementary Table S2 for a full description of database variables.

Fig. 2

Workflow for creating the Multimedia Monitoring Database. Details of each workflow phase are included in the Methods and Technical Validation sections.

Fig. 3

Location of origin of single-sample data in the Multimedia Monitoring Database. Single-sample data are from 42 countries, with most samples from the United States or Europe. Color denotes count of individual samples (N_samples) in each country or U.S. state.