Series: Environmental Research Advances
BISAC: SCI039000

The purpose of this book is to provide the latest, if not complete amount of updated information regarding the use of sediments for the estimation of chemical pollution in the aquatic environment from three main perspectives, namely, monitoring, ecological risk assessment and environmental management. The intended readers of this book include academicians, policy-makers, university students and researchers. This book contains eleven chapters. Chapters Three, Four, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten and Eleven mainly contain monitoring studies of pollutants (especially heavy metals) and sedimentary characteristics. Chapters Two, Five, Six, Eight, Nine and Ten have the portions largely consist of the monitoring data for the ecological risk assessments. Chapters One, Two, Four, Seven, Eight and Ten include recommendations for possible environmental management.

Chapters One, Three, Four, Nine and Ten are reviews based on published data and findings, but with new insights and perspectives from researchers points of view. Chapter One reviews thirty publications, published between 2015 and August 2017, the management of coastal environments focusing on the pollutants investigated in the sedimentary components of the resourceful area in the coasts. Chapter Three reviews and compares scientific papers related to sedimentary characteristics of the tsunami sediments and deposits after the 2004 Indian Ocean and 2011 Tohoku-oki Tsunamis. Chapter Four reviews fourteen ISI published papers on the metal contamination in sediments of the Persian Gulf that were impacted by anthropogenic activities. Chapter Nine investigates geographical spatial distribution, and the ecological and children’s health risk assessments of Copper (Cu) aquatic ecosystems ranging from rivers, mangroves, estuaries and offshore areas were investigated using cited Cu data in the sediments from 100 randomly selected published papers in the literature. Chapter Ten presents the geochemical speciation and risk assessment of heavy metals in southwestern Taiwan coastal sediments. The study was based on a review of more than eleven studies and the heavy metal data were re-analyzed for the enrichment factor and potential ecological risk index.

Other chapters (namely Chapters Two, Five, Six, Seven, Eight and Eleven) investigated metal pollution by using sediment watch, reporting metal data for the first time. Chapter Two presents the geochemical fractions of six heavy metals on surface sediments collected from drainages of Malacca’s industrial area and the Malacca River. Chapter Five presents the ecological risk assessment of heavy metals in the sediments collected, in 2007, from the Sepang Besar River and the Sepang Kecil River, that were previously a pig farming area in the early 1990s. Chapter Six investigates the distribution and enrichment of heavy metals in the surface marine sediments of coastal Sabah, Malaysia. Chapter Seven reports the concentrations of Cr, Co, Mn and Sc in the mangrove snail in association with the above four metals with their habitat surface sediments. Chapter Eight presents the ecological risk assessments of heavy metals in surface sediments collected from a rocky shore in Tanjung Harapan. Chapter Eleven reports the Nd isotopic signature in sedimentary Mn/Fe oxides, which can be used as a tracer of the variations of west Pacific oceanographic exchange during the last 27Ka.

Prominent scientists from Japan such as Prof. Hideo Okamura (Kobe University, Japan), Prof Hiroya Harino (Kobe College, Japan), Prof. Minoru Saito (Nihon University, Japan) and Prof. Kazuhiro Toyoda (Hokkaido University, Japan), Dr. Gen Kanaya and Dr. Tomohiko Isobe (both from National Institute of Environmental Sciences, Tsukuba, Japan), who co-authored some of the chapters have helped to improve the quality of the chapters in this book. Chapters from Prof Chen-Feng You from the National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan), and Dr. Moslem Sharifinia from the Iranian National Institute for Oceanography and Atmospheric Science (Iran) are also important elements concerning the construction of international readership for this book.