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This ultimately affects all living organisms that comprise an ecosystem. Ecotoxicology has been defined as a branch of toxicology that focuses on the study of toxic effects, caused by natural or synthetic pollutants. These pollutants affect animals (including humans), vegetation, and microbes, in an intrinsic way. [1]
Human impact on the environment. From top left, clockwise: satellite image of Southeast Asian haze; IAEA experts investigate the Fukushima disaster; a seabird during an oil spill; depiction of deforestation of Brazil's Atlantic forest by Portuguese settlers, c. 1820 –25; acid mine drainage in the Rio Tinto; industrial fishing in 1997, a practice that has led to overfishing.
Ecotoxicology is a relatively young discipline that made its debuts in the 1970s [2] in the realm of the environmental sciences. Its methodological aspects, derived from toxicology, are widened to encompass the human environmental field and the biosphere at large.
Human activities affect marine life and marine habitats through overfishing, habitat loss, the introduction of invasive species, ocean pollution, ocean acidification and ocean warming. These impact marine ecosystems and food webs and may result in consequences as yet unrecognised for the biodiversity and continuation of marine life forms. [3]
A trade-off between human health and the "health" of nature has been termed the "health paradox" [45] and it illuminates how human values drive perceptions of ecosystem health. Human health has benefited by sacrificing the "health" of wild ecosystems, such as dismantling and damming of wild valleys, destruction of mosquito-bearing wetlands ...
Ecological light pollution [1] is the effect of artificial light on individual organisms and on the structure of ecosystems as a whole.. The effect that artificial light has upon organisms is highly variable, [2] and ranges from beneficial (e.g. increased ability for predator species to observe prey) to immediately fatal (e.g. moths that are attracted to incandescent lanterns and are killed by ...
A diagram of the typical drivers of ecosystem collapse. [1]While collapse events can occur naturally with disturbances to an ecosystem—through fires, landslides, flooding, severe weather events, disease, or species invasion—there has been a noticeable increase in human-caused disturbances over the past fifty years.
Whole ecosystem disruptions will occur earlier under more intense climate change: under the high-emissions RCP8.5 scenario, ecosystems in the tropical oceans would be the first to experience abrupt disruption before 2030, with tropical forests and polar environments following by 2050. In total, 15% of ecological assemblages would have over 20% ...