Title: environmental bioavailability
Long Title: IUPAC Gold Book - environmental bioavailability
DOI: 10.1351/goldbook.14639
Status: current

Definition
Ratio of uptake clearance to the rate at which an organism encounters a given contaminant in an environmental medium (e.g., soil, sediment, water, food) being processed by the organism.

Note
This is a measure of an organism’s extraction efficiency, via respiratory, dietary, and surface absorption processes, from the environmentally available (bioaccessible) portion of a material.

Related Terms
- bioaccessible: https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/14469
- soil: https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/15036

Source
- PAC, 2009, 81, 829. 'Glossary of terms used in ecotoxicology (IUPAC Recommendations 2009)' on page 877 (https://doi.org/10.1351/PAC-REC-08-07-09)

Other Outputs
- html: https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/14639/html
- json: https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/14639/json
- xml: https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/14639/xml

Citation: Citation: 'environmental bioavailability' in IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 5th ed. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry; 2025. Online version 5.0.0, 2025. 10.1351/goldbook.14639
License: The IUPAC Gold Book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) for individual terms.
Collection: If you are interested in licensing the Gold Book for commercial use, please contact the IUPAC Executive Director at executivedirector@iupac.org .
Disclaimer: The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is continuously reviewing and, where needed, updating terms in the Compendium of Chemical Terminology (the IUPAC Gold Book). Users of these terms are encouraged to include the version of a term with its use and to check regularly for updates to term definitions that you are using.
Accessed: 2026-04-20T18:55:11+00:00