River Pollution

People who are not researchers are most likely to intersect environmental science in the context of protecting or restoring a place or species about which they are concerned, or in the context of pollution—trying to understand the sources and effects of contaminants, or trying to prevent or remediate environmental contamination. The works in this entry address pollutants affecting river ecosystems, including the people who live within or use resources from those ecosystems. Pollution is commonly subdivided based on the primary medium affected by contamination, creating categories such as air pollution, soil pollution, freshwater pollution, groundwater pollution, or marine pollution. In reality, of course, all of these media are intimately connected. Atmospheric deposition of contaminants pollutes soil and water bodies. Contaminated groundwater seeps into rivers, and contaminated rivers recharge groundwater aquifers. Fluxes of water, sediment, solutes, and even organisms carrying contaminants within their tissues create vectors to disperse pollutants. This is one of the great challenges to understanding and mitigating pollution: the contaminant is seldom an inert substance that stays in one place. Another great challenge is that there are many different types of contaminants, including human and animal wastes such as sewage or intestinal bacteria, excess nutrients, heavy metals, petroleum products, radioactive isotopes, and an enormous array of synthetic chemicals such as pesticides and personal care products. Each type of contaminant can disperse through environmental media, combining with other chemical compounds to form metabolites that may have different levels of toxicity for organisms or different dispersal mechanisms than the original contaminant. Yet another challenge in understanding and managing pollutants is that a substance that is harmful to one type of organism may not cause harm to another type of organism, but detailed knowledge of how individual pollutants affect the spectrum of living organisms is almost never available. Consequently, the environmental standards set by government agencies for maximum permissible levels of contaminants are based on very limited knowledge and are likely to be inadequate. Most of the standards are also based on acute effects that show up very quickly. Contaminant levels below permissible standards can cause chronic effects—subtle but pervasive changes that eventually degrade the health of individual organisms and populations. Some chronic effects result from bioaccumulation, as an organism accumulates contaminants within its tissues over the course of its life, and biomagnification, as organisms pass on their accumulated doses to predators or scavengers.