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Biodiversity preservation has not only become an ethical issue since the Rio de Janeiro “Earth Summit” but also an ecological issue. Indeed, biodiversity helps maintain the evolution process of life, regulate the physical and chemical balances of the biosphere (water, oxygen, and carbon cycles, etc) and to enable living organisms to absorb and breakdown organic and mineral pollutants present in the air, soil and water.
The water cycle is at the core of life development on Earth. In addition to its direct use in living beings, mastering water has always been an important factor in determining where populations would be based and develop. Water management has therefore become one of greatest concerns of the 21st century and policies need to match needs against water resources. This natural resource has become in the last decades an important socio-economic factor which necessitates careful management by countries regarding its financing and also equipment. It is therefore understandable that a large number of state institutions are careful about preserving this resource, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Industrial development, world population increase, non-treated domestic waste water rejections, agriculture-related pollutions (nitrates, phyto-sanitary chemicals) have all contributed to the gradual degradation of water quality, whether directly or through the degradation of the atmosphere, water ways, soils, and aquifers. Aquatic environments are particularly sensitive to anthropisation and in order to monitor their degradation, state institutions have often developed monitoring tools which usually only use standards for physical and chemical parameters, especially in already polluted areas and in high-risk areas. As demonstrated by many examples around the world, a chemical analysis alone can not forecast the real impact of pollutants on aquatic ecosystems and, therefore, does not highlight any potential dysfunction in the ecosystem.
Bio-monitoring is a management tool which uses aquatic fauna and flora to determine the overall quality of water. This appraisal principle is based on the fact that living organisms are exposed permanently to water quality variations and that they adapt to these variations. Physical and chemical measurements only provide a snapshot of the aquatic ecosystem conditions.
The applications of this technique are numerous for controlling and managing aquatic ecosystems especially for monitoring and evaluating:
- Acid rain impacts
- Heavy metal impacts
- Organic and chemical pollution impacts
- The impact of new synthetic chemical molecules (which are hard to measure)
- The impact of the accumulation of cross pollutions
- Climate change impacts
But also for evaluating:
- Depollution development strategies
- The adequacy of the water monitoring network and its development
Hydrobiological studies are able to provide a long term monitoring tool for measuring the quality of aquatic environments. They also provide a more genuine interpretation of real pollution impacts in aquatic environments. The world-wide dissemination of this tool for water management is therefore needed in the years to come.