NORMAN EMPODAT - SUSPECT Database

One of the key roles of the NORMAN Association is to act as an interface between science and policy. The identification and prioritization of known and truly emerging contaminants is essential to promote this role.

Information on the thousands of contaminants and their risk, hazard and exposure characteristics is stored in the NORMAN Database System (NDS). NORMAN Digital Sample Freezing Platform (DSFP) is one of the 13 NDS modules. It is used for archiving, processing, analysing, data mining and retrieving information from high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) data derived by the community of environmental scientists supporting NORMAN activities. During the past three years, DSFP has been enriched with numerous datasets from various monitoring campaigns such as the Joint Danube Survey 4 (JDS4; International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River, 14 European countries and EU; http://www.danubesurvey.org/jds4), Joint Black Sea Surveys (EU/UNDP EMBLAS-II and EMPLAS-Plus projects; https://emblasproject.org), monitoring of Dnieper, Dniester, Siverskyi Donets rivers, Antarctic Station Vernadsky, EU LIFE APEX project dealing with the monitoring of top predators and their prey (https://www.lifeapex.eu), waste water effluents across Europe and many others. All these HRMS datasets can be revisited to retrieve information about the occurrence of contaminants of emerging concern employing retrospective suspect screening workflow. Semi-quantitative estimates of concentrations of suspects detected in the samples can be obtained and used in the prioritisation process.

A systematic retrieval of occurrence data of all compounds in the NORMAN Substance database (106,551 compounds as of December 2020; NORMAN SusDat) in samples archived in DSFP will be carried out in support of the prioritization exercises conducted within the context of WG1. The proposed activity is a continuation of the previous activity from 2020 where the updated (target & suspect data) prioritization scheme has been applied to pilot-scale datasets to test the new prioritization scheme as a proof of concept (paper in preparation). At present, the compounds identified in individual samples (at differing confidence levels) and their semi-quantitative occurrence data (with varying uncertainties) are stored in spreadsheet files and used for various project-related purposes. The main goal of this activity is to bring this valuable information to the on-line platform in a harmonised format and make the data available for the NORMAN Prioritisation scheme and any other purposes. The outcomes of EMPODAT – SUSPECT database are supposed to be an important building block of the European Early Warning System for chemical pollution in the environment.