CRETUS Institute, Ecology Area, Department of Functional Biology, Faculty of Biology, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela 15782, Spain.
CRETUS Institute, Ecology Area, Department of Functional Biology, Faculty of Biology, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela 15782, Spain.
Sci Total Environ. 2024 May 1;923:171601. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.171601. Epub 2024 Mar 8.
Mosspheres are a kind of moss transplants which offer a novel approach for detecting atmospheric pollution using devitalized mosses, as they reflect the atmospheric deposition of certain elements and polycyclic hydrocarbons. However, due to the unique features of the mosspheres such as the low elemental concentrations in the cultured material, the data treatment needs to be different from that of conventional biomonitoring studies. In this article, our objectives are to identify the best parameter for expressing the levels of chemical elements accumulated by mosspheres, and to apply a recently developed method to assess the probability of pollution of each sample and of the study area. To do this, we used data from a study in which 81 mosspheres were exposed in a medium-sized city in southwestern Europe. Comparing different pollution indices, we selected the enrichment rate (ER) as the most useful, as it is resilient to fluctuations in the initial concentrations and takes into account the time factor, allowing for greater comparability among studies. Then, we determined that the statistical distribution of the ERs of most elements fitted a normal distribution, showing that most samples did not differ significantly from the background concentrations for these elements. On the other hand, for Ni, Pb and Zn there was a subpopulation of samples above background values. In these cases, we determined the probability of pollution of each sample. Finally, we used indicator kriging to calculate the probability of pollution across the study area, identifying the polluted areas, which for some elements match the distribution of the main industries and highways, indicating that this is a suitable protocol to map elemental pollution in urban areas.
苔藓球是一种苔藓移植体，它为利用失活的苔藓来检测大气污染提供了一种新方法，因为它们反映了某些元素和多环芳烃的大气沉积。然而，由于苔藓球具有独特的特征，例如培养材料中的元素浓度低，因此数据处理需要与传统的生物监测研究不同。在本文中，我们的目标是确定表达苔藓球积累的化学元素水平的最佳参数，并应用最近开发的方法来评估每个样本和研究区域的污染概率。为此，我们使用了在欧洲西南部一个中等城市进行的 81 个苔藓球暴露实验的数据。通过比较不同的污染指数，我们选择了富集率（ER）作为最有用的指标，因为它对初始浓度的波动具有弹性，并且考虑了时间因素，使得不同研究之间具有更好的可比性。然后，我们确定了大多数元素的 ER 统计分布符合正态分布，这表明大多数样本与这些元素的背景浓度没有显著差异。另一方面，对于 Ni、Pb 和 Zn，有一部分样本的浓度高于背景值。在这些情况下，我们确定了每个样本的污染概率。最后，我们使用指示克立格法计算了研究区域的污染概率，确定了污染区域，对于一些元素，这些区域与主要工业和高速公路的分布相吻合，这表明这是一种在城市地区绘制元素污染图的合适方法。
