24th Pacific Science Congress (PSC-24)

Decades after global restrictions under the Stockholm Convention, organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) remain detectable in marine mammals—the ocean’s apex sentinels—yet evidence is fragmented across species, organs, analyte panels, and sampling approaches, limiting policy evaluation and health-relevant synthesis. We conducted a literature retrieval based on the Web of Science Core Collection (1990–2025) and utilized CiteSpace to map the knowledge landscape, thereby analyzing the field's knowledge structure and temporal dynamics across annual output, international collaboration, keyword co-occurrence, clustering, and timeline views. Publication trends follow a three-phase trajectory—slow start, steady growth, rapid ascent—while collaboration consolidates around North America and Europe with expanding hubs in East Asia and Oceania. Four enduring domains emerge: (1) species-specific accumulation and organ/tissue distribution, with blubber and liver as dominant sinks; (2) environmental transport and fate of typical OCPs (DDT, HCHs, chlordane, HCB); (3) toxicological endpoints including endocrine and immune disruption; and (4) ecological risk assessment and source tracing. Timeline analysis traces a shift from baseline residue surveys in the 1990s to mechanism-oriented work on trophic transfer, age/sex differences, and maternal transfer, and—during the last 15 years—to co-exposure with climate variability, microplastics, and metals alongside standardization of non-lethal sampling (biopsy, feces, blow) and policy-effect evaluation. Case clusters centered on ice-associated predators and wide-ranging odontocetes highlight how lipid stores, life history, and diet jointly govern burdens and intergenerational transfer. Together, these patterns identify where evidence is robust and where comparability is weak, and they motivate actionable next steps: harmonized OCP panels aligned with Stockholm listings, organ-resolved baselines with standardized metadata, broader adoption of validated non-lethal sampling, and models that couple exposure to health metrics—providing a roadmap to sharpen future monitoring, mechanistic inference, and policy accountability.
 

Organochlorine pesticides; Marine mammals;Bioaccumulation; Bibliometrics;