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 the taxa identified. A diagnosis on ecosystem health should result from this. The diagnosis is derived from comparing impacted zones with reference zones, where minimum human pressure is proven. The quality of aquatic ecosystems will thus be geographically referenced and their evolution with time recorded. Regulators and managers of environmental quality will get precise and relevant information and will report this information to the European Union. Remediation plans can then be decided and checked for their real performance at the ecological level. Such an improvement of environmental management, although already performed by several European countries, is very new in this context. Most of the actions in the past have used chemical analyses of several parameters mainly dealing with organic pollution. The new WFD will allow us to check the eco-epidemiological results of several human impacts on aquatic ecosystems, such as toxic pollution and habitat modification. My text intends to show some consequences of the WFD in the field of ecotoxicology.