Advancements in Biomonitoring and Remediation Treatments of Pollutants in Aquatic Environments, 2nd Edition

Worldwide anthropogenic activities continuously produce and release hundreds of potentially toxic chemicals that contaminate ecosystems, leaving devastating effects on the environment and living beings, humans included. Water pollution has received more and more concern because of the increasing contemporary requests for clean and safe drinking water and the general awareness of the severe conditions of water sources. Freshwater contaminants include industrial effluents containing metals, dyes, pharmaceuticals, other organic compounds, wastewater treatment plant effluents, a complex mixture of municipal, hospital, runoff agrochemicals, and mining activity residues [1,2,3,4]. Additional environmental stressors are eutrophication, overfishing, excess exploitation, and land-use changes. The microbiological contamination is a different but equally serious threat to ecosystem stability and human health [5,6]. Seawater is particularly affected by antifouling agents, paints, petrol additives, ship maintenance activities, and existing river contaminants. Moreover, water bodies and their inhabitants are now facing the threats of this century via contamination with nanomaterials, notably plastic debris [7,8,9,10,11]. The requested global efforts to face these problems can probably find significant help in the new tools developed in the research of biomonitoring and remediation technologies. To design proper remediation strategies, both the origin and impacts of the threats must be accurately diagnosed using chemical, biological, spatial, and temporal integrated data [12,13,14]. Accordingly, biomonitoring is a transdisciplinary activity that evaluates the type, source, and extent of pollution and its consequences on a single species, the ecosystems’ structure, and the food chain.