Development of Environmental Monitoring System Using Oligochaetes in Aquatic Ecosystems

Abstract

Sustainable ecosystem management is one of the major issues. This is based on the appropriate assessment of target ecosystems. Recently, besides of physicochemical factors for ecosystem assessment, the importance of biological monitoring and assessment approaches have continuously been suggested and nowadays commonly applied. Among various organisms, oligochaetes which are easily found and have high abundance in freshwater to brackish water have been considered as one of the representatives to monitor or detect various contaminants such as toxicants, organism pollution, etc. In this study, we review the approaches of biological monitoring using aquatic oligochaetes, present trends of biological monitoring techniques, and provide perspectives for the future development.