Guidelines For The Use Of Biological Material In First Order Pollution Assessment And Trend Monitoring

New Approaches to Monitoring Aquatic Eco-systems

Handbook of Ecotoxicology

The Handbook of Ecotoxicology provides a readily accessible, yet critical collection of information on ecotoxicological testing. Now available in a single paperback volume, this handbook represents excellent value. Part A concentrates on techniques, especially those tests used for prediction. Thorough descriptions of the main tests are provided, followed by critical analyses in terms of ease of handling, repeatability and ecological relevance, and finally, an extensive bibliography citing key documents describing test methods and key papers evaluating them. Part B focuses on the toxicants themselves: summarising their ecological effects, describing ways of predicting effects from physico-chemical properties alone, and describing and discussing fate models. Now available as a single volume in paperback An invaluable reference resource

Pollution Threat of Heavy Metals in Aquatic Environments

The role of the European Community in developing environmental legislation has focused the minds of pollution control agencies and industrialists on the need for, and the evidence to support, water quality standards. This is particularly so for the Dangerous Substances Directive which has led to European standards for cadmium, mercury and lindane. Additionally the United Kingdom has published standards for six other non-ferrous metals. In this book I have sought to review the aquatic toxicity information for these and other metals, not just by the collation of the results of all the published toxicity tests, but by the critical consideration of the test techniques. A surprising proportion of the reported toxicity studies for aquatic organisms are based on unsatisfactory chemical or biological methods. That such weaknesses persist at a time of limited resources for environmental research is disappointing, especially when sound metho dologies are extensively documented and widely published. Evaluation of the critically reviewed and vetted data indicates that many of the previously accepted generalisations about the toxicity of metals to aquatic life are invalid: for instance the assumption that salmonid species of fish are more susceptible to these metals than coarse fish, or that increased water hardness decreases toxicity. Too few studies have actually sought to test such hypotheses.