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3A - Biomarker/Biomonitoring (TUP/168) Application of Multimarker Pollution Index (MPI): two cases in the Venice Lagoon. Nasci, Cristina1, Pampanin, Daniela Maria1, 1 Institute of Marine Biology, CNR, Venice, Venice, Italy ABSTRACT- The biomonitoring programs are widely applied in the evaluation of pollution impact on marine ecosystems analysing the physiological status of sentinel organisms (bioindicators) by a battery of selected biological stress indices, commonly defined biomarkers. Even if these data may be useful for scientific knowledge in evaluating the responses to natural and anthropogenic variations, it is very difficult the translation of biological data into information for environmental management. In the last years, the attention were focused on the possibility to find a relative easy way to understand the meaning of the biological data. To this end, a Multimarker Pollution Index (Narbonne et al., 1999) is applied to transform biological results in a easy tool to classify pollution level in the aquatic environment. The biochemical data of two studies carried out in different impacted areas of the Venice Lagoon have been elaborated by one-way ANOVA and Tukey test, to calculate a global index, to facilitate the evaluation of the organism physiological status alteration and the comparison between the different sampling sites. The MPI values of the urban zone monitoring project are able to classify the sites according with the pollution level. However, data of the survey carried out in several sites widespread all over the Lagoon are not in good agreement with the known pollution degree of studied sampling sites. The MPI is resulted a useful tool and seemed to be able to translate biomarker data into information for estimating the quality level of environments characterized by a relative homogeneous stress conditions. Even if it should be taking in account the biological meaning of applied biomarkers and the peculiarity of the studied environment. Further analysis will be undertaken to a better applications of this method in a transition environment, as the Lagoon. Key words: biomarkers, multimarker pollution index, Mytilus galloprovincialis, Venice Lagoon |
