Chemometrical approaches to evaluate analytical data from aquatic macrophytes and marine algae

The possibility of using aquatic macrophytes and algae as bioindicators of water pollution is investigated. The use of cluster analysis enables the treatment of the analytical data in a global way, revealing hidden clusters of similar behaviour between various biological species or sampling sites. A great number of species was collected from four rivers and fourteen coastal sites in Greece and were analysed for zinc, copper, cadmium, lead and manganese. The analytical data obtained were treated by hierarchical clustering, for marine algae and aquatic macrophytes separately.