'' is sensitive to air pollution. The presence or absence of certain plant or other vegetative life in an ecosystem can provide important clues about the health of the environment:
environmental preservation. There are several types of plant biomonitors, including
mosses,
lichens,
tree bark,
bark pockets,
tree rings, and
leaves. As an example, environmental pollutants can be absorbed and incorporated into tree bark, which can then be analyzed to pollutant presence and concentration in the surrounding environment. The leaves of certain vascular plants experience harmful effects in the presence of ozone, particularly tissue damage, making them useful in detecting the pollutant. These plants are observed abundantly in Atlantic islands in the Northern Hemisphere, the Mediterranean Basin, equatorial Africa, Ethiopia, the Indian coastline, the Himalayan region, southern Asia, and Japan. These regions with high endemic richness are particularly vulnerable to ozone pollution, emphasizing the importance of certain vascular plant species as valuable indicators of environmental health in terrestrial ecosystems. Conservationists use such plant bioindicators as tools, allowing them to ascertain potential changes and damages to the environment. Lichen are well known bio-indicators used to monitor and measure pollution levels. Recognised scales exist allowing the level of pollution to be assessed depending on the species composition present. Most well known is the Hawskworth Rose scale. The utility of lichen in this respects comes from the different tolerance different species have to various pollutants, meaning presence and absence of certain key species can be used to gauge overall pollution levels. As an example,
Lobaria pulmonaria has been identified as an indicator species for assessing stand age and macrolichen diversity in Interior Cedar–Hemlock forests of east-central British Columbia, highlighting its ecological significance as a bioindicator. The abundance of
Lobaria pulmonaria was strongly correlated with this increase in diversity, suggesting its potential as an indicator of stand age in the ICH. This highlights the lichen's valuable role in assessing environmental health and identifying areas with elevated pollution levels, aiding in targeted mitigation efforts and environmental management strategies. Fungi is also useful as bioindicators, as they are found throughout the globe and undergo noticeable changes in different environments. Lichens are organisms comprising both fungi and
algae. They are found on rocks and tree trunks, and they respond to environmental changes in forests, including changes in forest structure –
conservation biology,
air quality, and climate. The disappearance of lichens in a forest may indicate environmental stresses, such as high levels of
sulfur dioxide, sulfur-based pollutants, and
nitrogen oxides. The composition and total biomass of algal species in aquatic systems serve as an important metric for organic
water pollution and nutrient loading such as nitrogen and phosphorus. There are
genetically engineered organisms that can respond to
toxicity levels in the
environment;
e.g., a type of genetically engineered grass that grows a different colour if there are toxins in the soil.
Indicator fungi Penicillium species,
Aspergillus niger and
Candida albicans are used in the pharmaceutical industry for microbial limit testing, bioburden assessment, method validation, antimicrobial challenge tests, and quality control testing. When used in this capacity,
Penicillium and
A. niger are compendial mold indicator organisms. Metagenomic techniques allow for the sequencing of whole populations of microorganisms in a single operation. With metagenomic sequencing, it is possible to use the entire community of fungal organisms, or mycobiome in the soil or water of a given area as a biological indicator of anthropogenic activity, such as sewage overflow from an urban area or fertilizer and pesticide runoff from an agricultural one. Composition of fungal communities has been found to be a good indicator of environmental properties like pH, altitude and water temperature. Chauvet used this approach to take ecosystem-wide measurements of these variables using a network of monitoring stations at 27 streams in Southwestern France. Cudowski
et al. sampled fungi in the water of the Augustow canal in eastern Poland. They took many standard measures of water quality -- temperature, oxygen saturation, pH, and dissolved nitrogen, organic carbon and sulfur levels. They identified species with microscopic methods and RFLP analysis. They found 38 fungal species, including 12 hyphomycetiae and 13 potential pathogens, belonging either to the dermatophytes or to relatives of
C. albicans. Cudowski
et al. found that they could determine whether a sample of water had been taken from the natural (lake-like) or artificial part of the canal. They also found that the three major groups of fungi that they found, hyphomycetes, dermatophytes and Candida relatives, could predict many of their water quality measurements, which formed two clusters in a redundancy analysis. Bouffand
et al. used Arbuscular Mycorhizzal Fungi (AMF), an asexual clade of fungi that form symbiotic relationships with plant root systems, as indicators to assess soil function and biodiversity in many sites across Europe. They took soil samples in various climatic zones (atlantic, continental, mediterranean, alpine) and three land use regimes (arable, grassland, forestry), and sequenced the DNA of the fungi the soil contained. They found eight indicator species for soil pH: four that were only present when pH was less than 5, three for pH > 5 and one for pH > 7. They found eight indicators of land use: two for forests, five for farm- and grassland, and one for both. They also found one indicator fungus that was present when soil organic carbon was high, and another present when it was low. ==Animal indicators and toxins==