Land and Water, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Ecosciences Precinct, Dutton Park QLD 4102, Australia.
Australian Centre for Research on Separation Science (ACROSS), School of Science, RMIT University, Bundoora West Campus, PO Box 71, Bundoora, VIC 3083, Australia.
Emerg Top Life Sci. 2022 Apr 15;6(2):185-199. doi: 10.1042/ETLS20210261.
Current environmental monitoring efforts often focus on known, regulated contaminants ignoring the potential effects of unmeasured compounds and/or environmental factors. These specific, targeted approaches lack broader environmental information and understanding, hindering effective environmental management and policy. Switching to comprehensive, untargeted monitoring of contaminants, organism health, and environmental factors, such as nutrients, temperature, and pH, would provide more effective monitoring with a likely concomitant increase in environmental health. However, even this method would not capture subtle biochemical changes in organisms induced by chronic toxicant exposure. Ecosurveillance is the systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of ecosystem health-related data that can address this knowledge gap and provide much-needed additional lines of evidence to environmental monitoring programs. Its use would therefore be of great benefit to environmental management and assessment. Unfortunately, the science of 'ecosurveillance', especially omics-based ecosurveillance is not well known. Here, we give an overview of this emerging area and show how it has been beneficially applied in a range of systems. We anticipate this review to be a starting point for further efforts to improve environmental monitoring via the integration of comprehensive chemical assessments and molecular biology-based approaches. Bringing multiple levels of omics technology-based assessment together into a systems-wide ecosurveillance approach will bring a greater understanding of the environment, particularly the microbial communities upon which we ultimately rely to remediate perturbed ecosystems.
当前的环境监测工作通常侧重于已知的、受监管的污染物，而忽略了未测量的化合物和/或环境因素的潜在影响。这些具体的、有针对性的方法缺乏更广泛的环境信息和理解，阻碍了有效的环境管理和政策制定。转而进行全面的、非靶向的污染物、生物机体健康和环境因素（如营养物质、温度和 pH 值）监测，将提供更有效的监测，同时可能会提高环境健康水平。然而，即使是这种方法也无法捕捉到生物体受到慢性毒物暴露诱导的微妙生化变化。生态监测是对与生态系统健康相关的数据进行系统收集、分析和解释的过程，它可以解决这一知识空白，并为环境监测计划提供急需的额外证据。因此，它将对环境管理和评估非常有益。不幸的是，“生态监测”的科学，特别是基于组学的生态监测，并不广为人知。在这里，我们概述了这一新兴领域，并展示了它在一系列系统中的有益应用。我们预计，这篇综述将成为通过整合全面的化学评估和基于分子生物学的方法来改进环境监测的进一步努力的起点。将基于组学技术的多个层面的评估整合到一个系统范围的生态监测方法中，将使我们更深入地了解环境，特别是我们最终依赖于修复受到干扰的生态系统的微生物群落。
