Microbial ecotoxicology: Looking to the future

Abstract

Chemicals pose a certain risk to microbial communities, but effects may be accumulative or synergistic with other stressors also affecting microbes in freshwater ecosystems. Precisely, a main challenge faced by microbial ecotoxicologists is to discern the effects of chemicals from those caused by co-occurring stressors on microbial communities, and this requires the ability to use and integrate new and not so new techniques to accurately describe their responses and scaling them up to the ecosystem.