Diagnostics in ballast water management

Evaluation of ballast water risk assessment

Risk Assessment as a Decision Supporting Tool in Ballast Water Management

After almost two decades of intensified research, regulatory and political activities focussed on the prevention of harmful organisms and pathogen transfers around the world, in 2004 the International Convention on the Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediments (BWM Convention) was adopted to provide for a common and globally uniform ballast water management (BWM) approach. Recognising th...

Difficulties in obtaining representative samples for compliance with the Ballast Water Management Convention.

As implementation of the Ballast Water Convention draws nearer a major challenge is the development of protocols which accurately assess compliance with the D-2 Standard. Many factors affect the accuracy of assessment: e.g. large volume of ballast water, the shape, size and number of ballast tanks and the heterogeneous distribution of organisms within tanks. These factors hinder efforts to obta...

Application of flow cytometry in ballast water analysis—biological aspects

Ballast water may, when discharged, cause the spread of nonindigenous and potentially invasive species. International ballast water treatment regulations have accelerated the development of new methods to detect, enumerate and assess the status of organisms in the water to be discharged. Flow cytometry (FCM) is a powerful technique with a broad range of applications with the possibility for mul...

Global hot spots of biological invasions: evaluating options for ballast-water management.

Biological invasions from ballast water are a severe environmental threat and exceedingly costly to society. We identify global hot spots of invasion based on worldwide patterns of ship traffic. We then estimate the rate of port-to-port invasion using gravity models for spatial interactions, and we identify bottlenecks to the regional exchange of species using the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm for n...