What is the difference between a point source and non-point source of pollution?

Question

What is the difference between a point source and non-point source of pollution? Which is more difficult to control and why?
Why may a researcher want to use a bioindicator species to monitor pollutants in a stream? List two advantages of using a bioindicator approach to monitor pollutants.

What kind of organism would be an ideal bioindicator species to monitor? List two features the species should have.
Name one disadvantage of a bioindicator approach. What approach would you use as an alternative to address that disadvantage?

Explanation / Answer

Point source of pollution-The contaminants are introduced in the nature from a single location. Eg- contaminants from an industry.

Non-point source of pollution-The contaminants are introduced from many diffused sources. For eg- contaminants from landfills,drainage,seepage,atmospheric deposition etc.

Non-point source is more difficult to control as it comes from the everyday activities of people and the location is also not defined making it even more cumbersome to curb.

Researchers would want to use bioindicators to monitor pollutation as they have the ability to indicate direct and indirect effects of pollutants which many physical or chemical measurements can’t and produce both qualitative and quantitative results. Through bioindicators, only single indicating species needs to be monitored rather than the whole community.

Ideal bioindicator species features-

-highly abdundant and wide spread.

-Specific to the particular environment/area to be monitored

-should be representative to responses of other ecosystems

-easy sampling and storage

-The species shpuld be able to accumulate and concengrate the toxin to measurable levels.

Apart from the many advantages,few disadvantages of bioindicators are that they may be influenced by factors other than the disturbance or stress (e.g., disease, parasitism, competition, predation). second the bioindicator species may have differing habitat requirements than other species in their ecosystem and managing an ecosystem according to the habitat requirements of a particular bioindicator may fail to protect rare species with different requirements. To curb these,we could use two species as bioindicators or biomonitors for a better monitoring of the ecosystem with overlapping habitat requirement so that better results could be obtained without much disadvantages.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse W
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.