"It is right up there with the Apollo program; a permanent and sustainable solution to the global energy and food challenges, appreciated by the public but not yet solved; the global freshwater problem, not yet appreciated by the general public; and global climate change, still vehemently denied by the scientific illiterati.
In this study we report specific results that suggest a freshwater problem during the coho smolt migration is also a contributing factor in the Thompson River system of British Columbia (BC; Fig. 1).
With that sort of resource, you could solve a great many of the planet's freshwater problems.
"We're working on freshwater problems with real-life applications, and we're trying to inform policy development and regulations," says Alex Bielak, Director of the Science Liaison Branch of NWRI.
Freshwater problems link a future 'perfect storm' of climate change, self-inflicted problems of health and economics in the developed world, poverty, overpopulation, and disease in the developing world, and, most fundamentally, conversion of most former land biomes to anthromes: human-dominated, agricultural and urban systems, with consequent diminution of regulatory ecosystem services.
The Douro estuary (NW Portugal) suffers from both problems: freshwater input of nitrate and organic load from untreated wastewater discharges.
The heavy metals after reaching to freshwaters cause serious problem due to their long persistence, bioaccumulation, biomagnification in the food chain, and toxicity to the organisms.
Although some estuarine species, for example, Corophium acherusicum, Enteromorpha linza, and Ctenogobius giurinus, can be used for the study of ecotoxicology in marine environments, the research still lags well behind that in freshwater environments, and problems such as species specificity and the lack of genetic information in these species do exist.
Clonorchis sinensis (C. sinensis) infections remain the common public health problem in freshwater fish consumption areas.
Moreover, when injected, V. harveyi was shown to be highly virulent to M. rosenbergii juveniles, which was suggested to become an increasing disease problem to freshwater hosts (Siripornadulsil et al. 2014).
Yet, the negative climate change impacts on surface water resources and increasing pressure on groundwater for agriculture, construction and, domestic use will likely exacerbate the problem of freshwater supply further (Shemsanga et al. 2016).
