Pollution chimique des estuaires. Etat actuel des connaissances

The scientific literature dealing with estuarine chemical pollution is characterized by the extreme diversity of the concerned organizations and by the multiplicity of available documents (internal reports, regional publications, etc.), often hard to access. It seemed important to gather the scattered information, to synthesize the current knowledge and to bring to light their main deficiencies. Because of the lack of information on the effects of other pollutants, we limited ourselves to a few groups of chemical compounds likely to alter the quality of the estuarine environment: metallic trace elements and radionuclides, pesticides and chlorinated diphenyls (PCB), and organic matter and nitrogenized and phosphorated nutritive compounds. However, provided in appendix are the few references we found on pollution by some synthesis organic compounds, by fluorides and by various industrial wastes. We chose to leave apart the problem of prevention and the fight against pollution as well as their socio-economic aspects.