g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/20/spending-review-cuts-environment). In various cases this cutting of budgets has reduced

the number of sampling locations ( De Jonge et al., 2006), frequency of sampling ( Abramic et al., 2012, or required looking for cheaper assessment methods ( Lampadariou et al., 2005). We accept that all fields include the ‘law of diminishing returns’, what may be called the 80/20 rule – in the first 20% of the time studying a problem then you obtain 80% of the information required, but to obtain the remaining 20% information then requires a disproportionate amount of time and energy. However, our fear here is that rather than scientific criteria BMS-354825 cost being used to define the level of monitoring, it is economics – i.e. the ‘bean-counters’ are now dictating the science to be undertaken such that we will reach a stage where monitoring is not longer fit-for-purpose or even, paradoxically, value-for-money. Biological/ecological monitoring is often centered on measuring the community composition of an area and detecting whether that has changed, for example due to pollution of the arrival of alien and invasive species (Gray and Elliott, 2009). One of the

ways proposed for saving money is to use presence/absence of learn more an ecological component instead of Selleckchem Akt inhibitor abundance (Bates et al., 2007) and another relates to the taxonomic sufficiency i.e. the use of high taxonomic levels (e.g. family instead of species), since its first formulation by Warwick (1988). This suggests that samples could be analysed

to higher taxonomic levels, detecting the pollution effects on marine communities with similar statistical accuracy, and saving money because of the higher cost of identifying organisms at the species level (Dauvin et al., 2003 and Dimitriou et al., 2012). In this way, it is interesting to note that the analysis to family level is only cheaper if you are skilled to species level; if you do not train taxonomists (which is the current trend in all countries) then even family level identification is difficult and expensive. We are also amazed that managers are willing to spend thousands of euros/dollars on chemical analyses but then complain about biological samples (which require people with skills instead of machines) costing money. Secondly, while it has long been accepted that analytical quality assurance/quality control (AQC/QA) is required in chemistry laboratories, which may commit up to 40% of their time and budget to this, there has been resistance to adopting this in biological analyses (Elliott, 1993 and Gray and Elliott, 2009).