Pollution & DTA
Monitoring and assessment
The final destination for many chemicals, pollutants and pharmaceuticals is often our rivers, lakes and coastal seas. It is vital to know and understand how these contaminants interact with the aquatic environment so that management decisions can be made in order to minimise environmental impacts.
Cefas designs, implements and evaluates monitoring programmes to assess the current impact of pollution in aquatic environments, and to predict the long-term effects.
Cefas chairs the UK group responsible for co-ordinating a national programme for marine monitoring. This programme aims to detect long-term trends in the physical, chemical and biological quality of the marine environment.
Cefas has recently gained mCERTS (Monitoring Certification Scheme) for the provision of DTA toxicity testing.
Assessment techniques
Cefas offers a wide range of techniques to measure and assess pollutants in the environment:
- Toxicity Identification (TIE)
- Toxicity based fractionation studies
- Direct Toxicity Assessment (DTA)
- Acute and chronic aquatic ecotoxicity testing
- Toxicity Reduction Evaluation (TRE)
- Biological effects monitoring
- Chemical analyses
- Environmental fate and pathway studies
- Surveys, in situ deployments and monitoring
- Environmental Effects Monitoring (EEM)
- Environmental risk assessment
- Computer modelling
- Geographical Information systems (GIS)
Applications
Our wide ranging services can be applied to:
- Assessing the toxicity of an effluent
- Detection of pharmaceutical chemicals and residues in the environment
- Emergency response advice for marine oil and chemical spills
- Identifying point sources of pollution
- Eutrophication studies for nutrient enrichment
- Assessment of environmental radioactivity
- Impact assessments for the offshore oil and gas industry
- Advice on the disposal of contaminated dredge material
- Investigating the effects of hormone pollution on fish (endocrine disruption)
