Home – Home – Jornals – Contemporary Problems of Ecology 2021 number 6

The pulp and paper industry is developed in the northern regions. Ecosystems of northern rivers are less capable of biological self-rinsing and more sensitive to anthropogenic pollution. Assessing the pollution of water bodies is important for controlling the conservation of their bioresources. This article provides a literature review which illustrates the main impacts of wastewater of the pulp and paper industry on aquatic ecosystems. It will be useful for monitoring practitioners. This paper discusses examples of the impact of wastewater of the pulp and paper industry on aquatic organisms at different levels of organization - from the molecular to the ecosystem. The review describes the responses of aquatic zoocenoses (zooplankton and zoobenthos) to pollution and the effects of specific substances that enter water bodies from the effluents of the pulp and paper industry. The paper analyses information about transformation of bottom sediments of rivers and lakes in the wastewater zone. An overview of data is given, which evaluates the impact of thermal pollution. This type of pollution often characterizes industrial wastewater. One of the large rivers in the European part of Russia is the Vychegda River. The rivers in its basin are important in the Komi Republic. Therefore, monitoring the condition of communities of aquatic organisms that inhabit it is an urgent task. This paper presents the results of hydrobiological observations carried out in the Vychegda in the 1980s. At that time, changes in communities of aquatic organisms in the area of pulp and paper industry were shown.