Environmental Toxicology. Homework - Essay Example

IBI is a multimetric index signifying the capacity of a habitat to sustain and maintain a balanced, incorporated, adaptive biological mechanism having the complete range of elements anticipated in a surroundings natural habitat (Noss, Westra & Pimentel, 2000). The user(s) categorizes environments to describe homogeneous series within or crossways environments such as lakes, streams, or wetlands; small or large streams. Metrics (attributes ) are selection that provides relevant and reliable signals about the biological impacts of human practices.

Sampling designs and protocols are developed that make sure that those attributes are measured precisely and accurately. Data is gathered from each location and analyzed to establish the orientation standard for every metric. The ranges of metric qualities are transformed to converted metricscores such as 1, 3, or 5 (Noss, Westra & Pimentel,