Biological Indices of Changes Including Primary Production

Abstract

Monitoring of pollution induced changes on populations and communities can be loosely divided into effects on functional attributes and effects on structural attributes. By functional attributes I mean the types, kinds and rates of flow of energy and materials through the system whereas structural attributes are the numbers of individuals, species and related characteristics such as biomass and how they vary through time. Clearly there are no hard and fast boundaries between functional and structural attributes since biomass can be regarded as both a functional and structural attribute. However, there are different strategies involved in applying monitoring programmes to functional and structural attributes and it is these that I wish to consider.