Objective
Background:
The purpose of this project is to set up a measurement infrastructure for a group of existing marine biological effects monitoring techniques. This infrastructure will organise the circulation of reference materials, the conduct of intercomparison exercises, and the co- ordination of practical training workshops. The ultimate aim is to develop a quality assurance system over a period of three years, which can then become self- financing, perhaps as part of the QUASIMEME quality assurance programme for chemical monitoring procedures in the marine environment. The infrastructure will then be available for use by any fee-paying laboratory that wishes to contribute data to national and international marine monitoring programmes.
The overall goals of the project are: - to develop appropriate reference materials or type collections; - to develop an infrastructure for assessing the comparability of data from individual laboratories; - to demonstrate that biological effects analyses are under statistical control and are of known quality.
Objectives: The ultimate output of the BEQUALM programme will be as follows:
a) An agreed set of protocols for biological methods used in marine monitoring;
b) An agreement on acceptable limits of variation for the methods in question;
c) A system for monitoring the output of Participating Laboratories and assessing their compliance with agreed quality standards;
d) An understanding of the costs implicit in running such a QA programme;
e) The establishment of a QA infrastructure which shall be continued as a self-funding service to European marine monitoring programmes.
Work programme: The following techniques will be covered by BEQUALM: - Water and sediment bioassays - Metallothionein measurement in fish - ALA-D activity in fish - DNA adduct measurement in fish - P4501A induction in fish - Imposex/intersex measurement in molluscs - Lysosomal stability in fish and invertebrates - Liver pathology and external fish disease - Fish reproductive success - Phytoplankton assemblage and chlorophyll-a analysis - Benthic community analysis.
State of progress: The project has started at the end of 1998.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsDNA
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepathology
- natural sciencesbiological scienceszoologyinvertebrate zoology
You need to log in or register to use this function
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
NR33 0HT LOWESTOFT
United Kingdom