Impact of Wastewater from the Pulp and Paper Industry on Aquatic Zoocenoses: A Review of the Literature

The pulp and paper industry is in active development in the northern regions. The ecosystems of northern rivers are less capable of biological self-rinsing and are more sensitive to anthropogenic pollution. Assessment of the pollution of waterbodies is important in order to control the conservation of their bioresources. This article provides a literature review that illustrates the main impacts of wastewater of the pulp and paper industry on aquatic ecosystems. It will be useful for specialists working with monitoring systems. 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 levels. The review describes the responses of aquatic zoocenoses (zooplankton and zoobenthos) to pollution and the effects of specific substances that enter waterbodies from the effluents of the pulp and paper industry. The paper analyzes information about the transformation of bottom sediments of rivers and lakes in the wastewater zone. An overview of data is given, and the impact of thermal pollution is evaluated. 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 of the condition of the communities of aquatic organisms that inhabit it is an urgent task. This paper presents the results of hydrobiological observations carried out on the Vychegda River in the 1980s. At that time, changes in the communities of aquatic organisms in the area of pulp and paper industry were observed.