ENGLISH

Bioassessment of Freshwater Ecosystems: Using the Reference Condition Approach

By Robert C. Bailey , Trefor B. Reynoldson (auth.) , Richard H. Norris

Book information

Publisher
Springer US
Year
2004
ISBN
978-1-4613-4705-7, 978-1-4419-8885-0
DOI
10.1007/978-1-4419-8885-0
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
6 MB (5973676 bytes)
Edition
1
Pages
170\176
Orientation
yes
Scanned
yes
Time added
2013-08-01 04:00:00
Environmentgeneral; Ecology; Freshwater & Marine Ecology; Ecogeneral; Political Science

Description

Aquatic ecosystem assessment is a rapidly developing field, and one of the newer approaches to assessing the condition of rivers and lakes is the Reference Condition Approach. This is a significant advancement in biomonitoring because it solves the problem of trying to locate nearby control or reference sites when studying an ecosystem that may be degraded, a problem that bedevils traditional approaches. Rather than using upstream reference sites in a river system or next-bay-over reference sites in a lake, an array of ecologically similar, least-exposed to stress sites scattered throughout a catchment or region is used. Once the reference condition has been established, any site suspected of being impacted can be assessed by comparison to the reference sites, and its status determined. The Reference Condition database, once formed, can be used repeatedly.

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