Comparative Study of the Sediment-Toxicity Index, Benthic Community Metrics and Contaminant Concentrations

摘要

This paper demonstrates how a new tool for integrating the results of a battery of sediment toxicity tests can be effective in assessing the relative toxic potential of freshwater sediments to aquatic organisms. This tool, called the Sediment-Toxicity (SED-TOX) Index, was applied to laboratory toxicity data derived from two larger projects conducted on freshwater sediments. The SED-TOX Index generates a single value that represents all the results of the different STTs on related with four benthic community metrics (species richenss, nember of taxa in the orders Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera and Trichoptera, the Shannon-Wiener diversity index, and the ICI-SL, which is a version of the invertegrate community index modified fro the St.Lawrence River) and levels of sediment contamination.