A unique monitoring and assessment service for terrestrial and aquatic habitats that is based on analyses of the communities of diverse and abundant microscopic organisms that live in the spaces between soil and sediment particles. This specialist technique was developed in the 1980s by Physalia as a monitoring service for regulators, enabling accurate and reliable detection and delineation of impacts associated with industrial and domestic effluents and other waste materials
We now supply these services to industry worldwide as a means of assessing the efficacy of effluent treatment programmes, detecting and monitoring impacts of terrestrial contamination (e.g. from landfills or present on legacy sites) and for assessing the existence and extent of environmental impacts of neighbouring operations that might otherwise lead to false blame for environmental harm
Examples of assignments using meiofaunal analyses include:
- Meiofaunal surveys of contaminated land sites to provide accurate mapping of “hot spots” of contaminant stress and aid targeting of clean-up and remediation resources.
- Combined meiofaunal and physico-chemical studies for the detection and delineation of effects following spill incidents that have occurred at industrial sites to provide evidence for use in legal proceedings
- Performance monitoring using meiofaunal surveys to assess improvements in receiving water habitats following the commissioning of new effluent treatment systems
- Meiofaunal monitoring to supply early warning of leachates from landfill sites entering a tidal estuarine system
- Meiofaunal sentinel studies to detect failure of biocide treatment programmes in once-through cooling water systems (power stations, refineries, industrial plants and paper mills)
- Meiofaunal tracing studies used to identify sources of foreign bodies and materials that have entered industrial process lines
- River and estuary wall meiofauna surveys providing regulatory authorities with indices of water quality in built-up urban watercourses bounded by hard engineered walls
- Meiofaunal surveys to provide statistically robust ecological data sets for multivariate correlations studies assessing ecological effects of individual effluent components and sediment contaminants
