Aquatic ecotoxicology: from the ecosystem to the cellular and molecular levels.

Effect-Based Tools for Monitoring and Predicting the Ecotoxicological Effects of Chemicals in the Aquatic Environment

Ecotoxicology faces the challenge of assessing and predicting the effects of an increasing number of chemical stressors on aquatic species and ecosystems. Herein we review currently applied tools in ecological risk assessment, combining information on exposure with expected biological effects or environmental water quality standards; currently applied effect-based tools are presented based on w...

Assessing effects of stress across levels of biological organization using an aquatic ecosystem health index.

Multimetric approaches typically consider only one level of biological organization to assess the effects of environmental stressors on the health of aquatic ecosystems. The present study applied integrative star-plot analysis to evaluate effects of stressors over several levels of biological organization ranging from the sub-organism to the community level at study sites subjected to different...

Guidance Document on Aquatic Ecotoxicology

The Role of Ecotoxicology for Monitoring Ecosystem Health

The proposed EC Water Framework Directive (WFD) incorporates some new concepts in the field of water protection. Most of these concepts rely on the use of applied ecology of water ecosystems. The most important feature is that the classification of water quality is to be based on direct biological measurements of ecosystem health. It means that real biological communities should be sampled and ...

Ecotoxicogenomics: the challenge of integrating genomics into aquatic and terrestrial ecotoxicology.

Rapid progress in the field of genomics (the study of how an individual's entire genetic make-up, the genome, translates into biological functions) is beginning to provide tools that may assist our understanding of how chemicals can impact on human and ecosystem health. In many ways, if scientific and regulatory efforts in the 20th century have sought to establish which chemicals cause damage t...