Trends in environmental analytics and monitoring

On the basis of vast literature research, it can be concluded that analytics and, particularly, environmental monitoring, are those areas of analytical chemistry that are expending most rapidly. Monitoring is a branch of analytics which employs fully automated measuring devices that have a very long time of unattended operation and are capable of providing information about the investigated object in a continuous manner in real-time, or with only a slight time delay. It constitutes the two pillars on which the entire environmental science is based. The tasks of analytics and environmental monitoring are discussed in this article. An examination of literature data leads to the conclusion that there is a number of trends in the area of application of various methods, techniques, and instrumentation to analytics and environmental monitoring. In general these trends fall into two different categories.: Development and practical application of new procedures, Novel designs of measuring devices and analytical instruments. Trends of both categories are discussed below in a more detailed manner.