研究与开发杂志
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国际标准期刊号: 2311-3278
国际标准期刊号: 2311-3278
汉斯·乌韦·达姆斯
水生环境健康状况的监测和评估应成为适应性管理计划的重要机制，旨在显示和修复污染及其对海洋环境造成的损害。单独采取的此类努力可能不足以注意到复杂海洋环境中综合生态系统健康的不良变化。这里的复杂性是由时空梯度提供的，例如地理、纬度、深度以及季节变化。此外，生物体在不同的整合水平（例如，在基因组和蛋白质组、生理学、细胞、组织和器官、个体、群体和群落水平）通常表现出可变的反应。生物群的特征还在于其分类学和个体发育敏感性的可变性以及不同的性别反应规范。大多数有毒物质在食物网内具有不同的个体生物累积和生物放大作用，这使得情况进一步复杂化。迄今为止，只有少数尝试挑战综合方法，使用物理和化学栖息地评估、生物监测以及生理、生化和基因毒理学参数来评估可能直接导致食物中毒的受污染水生生态系统的环境健康状况海洋渔业和水产养殖的安全措施。为了整合非生物和生物终点，应以系统为导向，采取不同的方法：物理、化学、生物；实验室与现场；领域（淡水、咸水、海底、水柱、界面）；有机体（生产者，消费者和分解者）；生物整合水平（生态、行为、化学和亚细胞）。
这适用于观测监测以及从分子到生态系统的所有整合级别的实验方法。大多数水生污染层面都面临着挑战：污染监测、处理和管理，以及国家和国际层面保护海洋环境的经济、社会和政策方面。生物累积发生在营养级内，代表生物体某些组织中某种物质由于从食物和环境中吸收而浓度增加。生物放大通常是由化学持久性、食物链能量学或内部降解和排泄率引起的。为了增强生物放大作用，污染物必须具有长寿命、可移动、可溶于脂肪且具有生物活性。新出现的外源性化学物质包括内分泌干扰化学物质（EDC），它能够对内分泌系统的功能产生不利影响，导致接触的动物和人类的生长、发育和繁殖发生变化。尽管类固醇雌激素在环境中的出现和影响已受到一些关注，但只有有限的证据表明野生或养殖鱼类中存在生物累积，而这些鱼类为人类消费提供了宝贵的食物来源。
Given the importance of oceans to humankind and the increasing pressure they are under, it is timely to identify and prioritize oceanic health issues that are covered in their ill-defined state by “marine pollution” (MP). MP increasingly leads to disturbances of the oceanic environment and its biota and adversely affects environmental and human health. Pollutants may have various biological impacts such as death, metabolic malfunction, genetic and phenological damage. If such impacts are sublethal, they will lead to fitness changes. Depleted numbers of sensitive species are causing a decrease in biodiversity, and may cause ecosystem function changes by habitat and food chain alterations and those of productivity patterns.
Major challenges in MP studies are conceptional as well as operational. Conceptionally, pollutants are very much understood as chemicals only. From a largely chemical perspective pollution studies need to open up to any stressor that affects organisms in their respective environment. Stress to organisms in the marine environment can be caused by physical (e.g., electromagnetic radiation, electricity, drag etc.) chemical (e.g., organic or inorganic), physico-chemical (pH) or biological factors (biotoxins, competition, predation, parasitism). MP is also very much perceived as man-made although there exists natural pollution since ever—if natural is understood as stressors of organisms that are not anthropogenic (e.g., input of freshwater, sediments and their contaminants, volcanic activity outside and inside the oceans). Natural pollution happened even before humans contributed to MP so much more in recent centuries.
Humans intensified natural MP and certainly created novel stressors through technological innovations. These got magnified as a new quality in the Anthropocene by man-made changes to soil, atmosphere and waters. The hydrosphere includes the oceans which cover about 70% of the earth's surface and are providing more than 99% of the earth's water resources. Man-made effects include industrial (e.g., noise, radiation, heavy metals, nanoparticles), agricultural (e.g., pesticides, antibiotics, fertilizers), and urban pollutants (e.g., organic matter, pharmaceuticals, CO2) which reach the oceans via various pathways, from the atmosphere, aquatic drainages and rivers, from coastal groundwater, and through organisms getting dispersed between these realms. Everything that humans are doing will have consequences. Human activities are never environmentally neutral.
As in all sciences it will be important to make temporal and spatial distinctions in MP studies. Spatially—the oceans are not separated from other realms, such as land and freshwater systems and the atmosphere. Multiple interfaces facilitate the fluxes of energy and matter that also allow the influx of stressors. Within the oceans there are interactions between sea bottom and water column, and water column and atmosphere (or seasonal and multi-year sea-ice and atmosphere during winter and in polar seas). Distribution patterns of stressors may exhibit substantial horizontal and vertical patchiness. Several characteristics of the sea surface can remotely be monitored meanwhile by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approaches. Temporally—stressors may act at a gradient of very different time scales: from geological times shaping the adaptation and evolution of organisms to minutes and seconds demarcating behaviour and even to parts of a second where chemical reactions typically take place.
There is a distinction between field and laboratory approaches. Field-oriented approaches are acting at the natural in situ platform where stressors originate or might get transformed, disposed and remobilized. Field approaches are often seen inferior to laboratory in vitro接近。后者有望提供更好的实验和分析分辨率。这是一个重大挑战，我们强烈呼吁将这两种方法结合起来，以便对我们最终关心的自然世界的作用机制获得更现实的理解。除了从自然或实验地点采集现场样本到实验室进行进一步研究之外，还可以进行微观到介观研究，提供从严格控制的实验到现实世界特有的各种变量之间日益复杂的相互作用的梯度。这里的主要挑战是研究多学科间的相互作用并将结果整合到系统方法中。