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Ecotoxicological characterization of the Sava River – biomarker responses and biological assays

Driving forces related to settlements, agriculture and release of contaminated untreated effluents from municipalities and industrial facilities that are greatly dominated by old and environmentally unfriendly technologies have always been considered as key elements that exert significant pressure on the ecological status of the Sava River. Despite such an unfavorable situation, the biological monitoring activities and chemical identification capabilities in most of the countries of the region have been traditionally restricted to a very limited number of biological markers and potentially hazardous contaminants, respectively. Nevertheless, the biomarker approach for the detection of hazardous chemical contamination in the Sava River was applied early in 1980s, and the research studies that followed in subsequent decades introduced various biomarkers measured in various freshwater species. The use of the small scale or in vitro bioassays has been more frequently used only from late 1990s, and culminated more recently with the investigations carried out within the related international research projects. In this chapter we present an overview of the research that has been done so far on the ecotoxicological evaluation of the Sava River using ecotoxicological biomarkers and bioassays, summarize the described evidence and offer a general evaluation of the present ecotoxicological status of the Sava River.

Sava River, ectoxicological evaluation, biomarkers, bioassays

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