Pollution Indicators and Their Detection

Headnote

Pollution is an undesirable change in the physical, chemical or biological characteristics of air, water and soil that may harmfully affect the life or create a potential health hazard of any living organism. The development, civilization and rapid industrialization by man has caused a great damage to the environment leading to environmental pollution. There has grown up a serious concern all over the world about the rivers turning murky, fish rotting on sea shores, trees withering, cities choking with foul air, toxic chemicals being cycled into food stuffs and diseases epidemics appearing so frequently. The microbes, plants, animals, bacteria, biotic communities etc. show different levels of sensitivity and can be successfully employed as indicators to access and predict environmental pollution in a timely manner.

Key words: Detection, Indicators, Pollution, Environment.

Pollution indicators

Organism/organisms or attributes of the community which can be used to provide information on State of the environment and change from normal conditions. Organisms (microbes, plants, insects, bacteria etc) serving as indicators of environmental pollution and giving Indications of the hazardous substances or indication of the state of environmental pollution of water, air, soil etc. by having ability to accumulate substances causing pollution are called pollution indicators. The first reference to environmental indicators is attributed to Plato, who cited the impacts of human activity on fruit tree harvest (Rapport, 1992). Ecological indicators are primarily used either to assess the condition of the environment (e.g., as an earlywarning system) or to diagnose the cause of environmental change (Dale and Beyeler, 2001).

Indicator species An indicator species is any biological species that defines a trait or characteristic of the environment. For example, a species may indicate an environmental condition such as a disease outbreak, pollution, species competition or climate change. Indicator species can be among the most sensitive species in a region, and sometimes act as an early warning to monitoring biologists.

Lindenmayer et al., 2000 suggest 7 alternative definitions of indicator species:

* A species whose presence indicates the presence of a set of other species and whose absence indicates the lack of that entire set of species.

* A keystone species, which is a species whose addition to or loss from an ecosystem leads to major changes in abundance or occurrence...