“Enclosure” Methodologies

The purpose of applied ecotoxicology is predicting damage to natural systems and the organisms that inhabit them. Chemical/physical monitoring systems are extremely important in ecotoxicological studies, but they are so frequently used by industry, various governmental organizations, and research groups that it seems inappropriate to use this limited discussion to detail these monitoring systems. For biological monitoring systems designed for ecotoxicological monitoring, reducing the number of false positives and negatives can be partly accomplished by using a large number of replicate units. The type of ecotoxicological study usually involves artificial substrates anchored at strategic locations in aquatic ecosystems. Working with microcosms that are small segments of natural, unstressed ecosystems, John Harte finds that such microcosms can be appropriately set up and operated so that the ecological events occurring in the microcosms approximately mimic or “track” those in the parent ecosystem.