Abstract
Widespread changes in natural and managed environments in the last century have been associated with rapid development of technology with the capacity for massive destruction of natural environments. This has been accompanied by large-scale natural disasters such as floods and droughts and by large-scale technical failures such as Chernobyl, impacting greatly on human existence and welfare. It is the impact on social conditions that has led to increasing interest in maintaining environmental quality and ensuring that human activities do not threaten the ecosystem on which we depend. The threats to human health by water and air pollution led to early research on bioindicators in order to map and monitor the effects of pollution on selected organisms. However the range of objectives to which biomonitoring is applied has grown steadily from water quality and atmospheric pollution to heavy metal accumulation, climate change, and to environmental issues involving management of natural resources such as the effects of fragmentation and habitat alteration, effects of development on biodiversity as well as assessing conservation practices for rare or endangered species.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Goldsmith, F.B. (1991) Monitoring for Conservation and Ecology, Chapman and Hall, London.
Hawksworth, D.L. (1991) The fungal dimension of biodiversity: magnitude, significance, and conservation, Mycological Research 95 (6), 641–655.
Hellawell, J.M. (1991) Development of a rationale for monitoring, in F.B. Goldsmith (ed.), Monitoring for Conservation and Ecology, Chapman and Hall, London, pp. 1–14.
Hunsaker, C.T. (1993) New concepts in environmental monitoring: The question of indicators, The Science of The Total Environment, Suppl., 77–95.
Legendre, P. and Legendre, L. (1998) Numerical Ecology, Elsevier, Amsterdam.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nimis, P.L., Scheidegger, C., Wolseley, P.A. (2002). Monitoring with Lichens — Monitoring Lichens. In: Nimis, P.L., Scheidegger, C., Wolseley, P.A. (eds) Monitoring with Lichens — Monitoring Lichens. NATO Science Series, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0423-7_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0423-7_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-0430-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-010-0423-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive