Persistent lead poisoning of waterfowl in the Camargue (southern France) 10 years after the ban on the use of lead ammunition in wetlands

Lead pollution is a worldwide environmental and health issue causing persistent detrimental effects on humans and wildlife. Despite having been identified as detrimental to waterfowl a century ago, in France lead shotgun pellets for hunting were banned only in 2006 and only in wetlands. We used long‐term monitoring data from the Camargue (southern France) to (1) assess the local effectiveness of the French regulation at reducing the ingestion of lead shotgun pellets by waterfowl and to (2) assess local hunter compliance with the regulation. We used data on 2187 gizzards from 13 waterfowl species collected from 38 hunters in the Camargue over 20 hunting seasons (1998 to 2017). In addition, from 2008 to 2019, we systematically collected shotgun shell cases at three communal wetland hunting sites and used the ratio of cases indicating lead versus nontoxic shotgun shells to estimate hunter compliance with the ban. Across the 20‐year study period that spanned pre‐ and post‐ban, gizzards of h..., , # Persistent lead poisoning of waterfowl in the Camargue (southern France) 10 years after the ban on the use of lead ammunition in wetlands

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.6q573n68s](10.5061/dryad.6q573n68s)

**Corresponding author information**

Name: Arnaud Béchet
ORCID: [https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0330-6342](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0330-6342)
Affiliation: Tour du Valat, Institut de recherche pour la conservation des zones humides méditerranéennes, Le Sambuc, 13200 Arles, France
email: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

## Description of the data and file structure

We collected bird gizzards opportunistically from a network of hunters in the Camargue during each hunting season from 1998/1999 to 2017/2018 (Figure [1](https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/csp2.70045#csp270045-fig-0001)). A total of 38 hunters contributed to the sampling effort. Those hunters harvested waterfowl both on communal hunting grounds (managed by the local hunting asso...,