Impact of Anthropogenic Activities on Microbial Community Structure in Riverbed Sediments of East Kazakhstan.

Heavy metal (HMe) pollution in regions with mining and metallurgy activities is known to be a serious environmental problem worldwide. Hydrological processes contribute to the dissemination of HMes (drainage, precipitation, flow rate). The aim of the present study is to investigate the microbial community structure in ten river sediments sampled in different regions of East Kazakhstan, which are contaminated with HMes.

Decreased atmospheric deposition of heavy metals in Latvia shown by long-term monitoring using the moss Pleurozium schreberi.

In Europe, economic restructuring and technological progress has been aimed at reducing pollution emissions at local, regional and global scales, which has been monitored using standard methods. Among the many methods used to determine deposition of heavy metals, in Europe moss has been used to monitor atmospheric pollution for more than 30 years on a 5-year cycle. This simple method can be used to assess improvement to the environment after massive economic change.

Current content of selected pollutants in moss, humus, soil and bark and long-term radial growth of pine trees in the Mezaparks forest in Riga.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the use of various indicators in the assessment of environmental pollution and to determine the response of pine to changes of pollution levels. Mezaparks is a part of Riga that has been subject to various long-term effects of atmospheric pollution and, in particular, historically from a large superphosphate factory. To determine the spatial distribution of pollution, moss, pine bark and soil O and B horizons were used as sorbents in this study, as well as the additional annual increment of pine trees.

Multilingual education of students on a global scale and perspective-international networking on the example of bioindication and biomonitoring (B&B technologies).

Living or formerly living organisms are being used to obtain information on the quality of the general health status of our environment by bioindication and biomonitoring methods for many decades. Thus, different roads toward this common scientific goal were developed by a lot of different international research groups. Global cooperation in between various scientific teams throughout the world has produced common ideas, scientific definitions, and highly innovative results of this extremely attractive working field.