Ecology for heavy metal pollution: recent advances and future prospects

Abstract

Studies of the ecology for heavy metal pollution have significantly advanced since the 1950s. Heavy metals, as one of important pollutants in the environment, are widely researched in the field of pollution ecology or ecology for environmental protection, which is more popularly used abroad. Many achievements have provided improved knowledge of metal mobility in ecological systems and in the context of environmental protection. We now have improved understanding of background soil concentrations, protocols, guidelines, monitoring and toxicity that have led to research and demonstration projects concerned with remediation of heavy metal contaminated sites. At the same time, many works related to this research field have also been widely published. In China, there is a focus for this research effort at many universities and research institutes, including the Department of Biology at Yunnan University (Kunming), the Institute of Environmental Science at Beijing Normal University (Beijing), the institute of Applied Ecology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Shenyang), the institute of Soil Science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Nanjing), the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing) and so on.This paper briefly reviews progress and current research on modeling of heavy metal mobility in soils and biota, from the molecular level to the ecosystem scale. Emphasis is given to recent advances that have improved knowledge of absorption, migration, accumulation, toxicity, detoxification and biological resistance. The future research effort is likely to focus on rhizosphere ecology, molecular ecology and evolutionary genetics under heavy metal pollution.Although many accomplishments have been achieved, many issues still remain unanswered such as the adaptive mechanisms at the molecular level, heavy metal speciation and bioavailability, the complication of combined-pollutants and the remediation technologies. Therefore, the authors also detect these issues existed and forecast the trend of ecology for heavy metal pollution in terms of the molecular mechanisms of biological adaptation to heavy metal pollution, the newly-found technology in remediating this pollution, the scientific determination of environmental standard under combined heavy metal pollution and the evolutionary trend of organisms in this situation.