Estuaries Ecosystems Health Status – Profiling the Advancements in Metal Analysis

Abstract

Estuaries are highly productive areas, which play an important role in both ecological and socioeconomic aspects. It is an excellence sanctuary for a wide variety of aquatic organisms and wildlife that breed and inhabit in these areas. Despite the importance of estuaries, they are being threatened and damaged at an alarming rate. Metal pollution is among the most serious environmental crises in estuaries ecosystems. The anthropogenic activities had resulted in the increase of metal elements released or leached into the environment. As such, deterioration of estuaries ecosystem health status by these substances promoted an urgency to monitor the concentration of metals in the environment. Although metals pollution studies have been carried out extensively all over the world but unfortunately there are still no measurements that can be fully rely to predict the effect of metal pollution on estuarine ecosystems. Therefore, current chapter is indispensable to demonstrate the advances of analytical methods and detection techniques available for metals analyses. In addition, environmental forensic approaches and application of various metal pollution indicators, indices, modeling and statistical analysis in assessing estuarine ecosystem health status was also has been highlighted in this chapter. This chapter also pointed out the gap of knowledge which should be addressed for future risk assessment of metals pollution in estuaries ecosystem. Current chapter could be served as a reference for future metals comparative studies and monitoring works to be carried out effectively.