Modified whole effluent toxicity test to assess and decouple wastewater effects from environmental gradients.

ABSTRACT: Environmental gradients and wastewater discharges produce aggregated effects on marine populations, obscuring the detection of human impact. Classical assessment methods do not include environmental effects in toxicity tests designs, which could lead to incorrect conclusions. We proposed a modified Whole Effluent Toxicity test (mWET) that includes environmental gradients in addition to effluent dilutions, together with the application of Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) to assess and decouple those effects. We tested this approach, analyzing the lethal effects of wastewater on a marine sandy beach bivalve affected by an artificial canal freshwater discharge used for rice crops irrigation. To this end, we compared bivalve mortality between canal water dilutions (CWd) and salinity cont

SUBMITTER: Sauco S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3673937 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature