Research note on chemical loads and ecological context of pesticides and POPs in Bahlui River, Romania

Given the complexity of the aquatic ecosystems, the huge number of potential pollutants and considering their effects on ecosystems and human health, the Directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament (the Water Framework Directive) recommends the use of integrated, chemical and biological approaches (WFD, 2000). We have carried out such an interdisciplinary approach, one of the first of this kind, within an independent Swiss-Romanian research project which was part of the ESTROM programme. While the approach and main technical results are already described elsewhere (Neamţu et al., 2008, Ciumasu and Costică, 2008), we aim at presenting here a research note which is meant to explain the importance of the main results for a more local audience.