Biomarkers in a Wider Ecological Context

However, there are a number of issues here. In the first place, stress itself is a somewhat nebulous concept, and there is continuing debate about how it should be defined. Second, even with the benefit of multivariate statistics and the techniques of bioinformatics, measuring stress from all sources in a meaningful way is dauntingly complex and may not be realizable in practice. 

So far as the discipline of ecotoxicology goes, there have been a number of cases where organic pollutants were shown to be the principal or sole cause of population declines in the natural environment, and these are described in the chapters that 

Organic Pollutants An Ecotoxicological Perspective, Second Edition 

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