ABSTRACT
Tolerance may be defined as the ability of organisms to cope with stress, either natural, such as temperature changes, salinity variations, oxygen level fluctuations, and plant toxins, or chemical, depending on anthropogenic inputs of many different classes of contaminants into the environment. Resistance is frequently used in the scientific literature as a synonym for tolerance. Several authors have tried to clarify these terms (Lotts and Stewart 1995; Morgan et al. 2007). However, the definitions they proposed were strongly different, and none of them is currently generally adopted. In this book, most of the authors use the term tolerance in acceptance of the
1.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................1 1.2 How May Tolerance Be Assessed? ...................................................................2 1.3 Inter-and Intraspecific Variability of Tolerance ..............................................4
