Biomagnetic monitoring of particulate matter

Urban environments are mainly exposed to high concentration of particulate pollutants. Vehicles and industries are the main sources of particles in the most urban environments. Air pollution concentration currently measures by physico-chemical methods. These methods for air quality monitoring in high spatial resolution are practically impossible and expensive. Therefore, a common strategy for dealing with this problem is to usebioindicators for air quality monitoring, as they are time and cost efficient. Some researchers reported the potential of soil, roadside and roof dust as proxy for monitoring of air pollution levels, but the number of researches on magnetic properties of plant leaves for monitoring of atmospheric pollution levels have recently increased. Therefore, this study assessed the potential of magnetic properties of plant leaves for monitoring of particles at high spatial resolution and also for using these information as input of particles dispersion modeling. Findings showed that leaf magnetic properties i) can distinguish between contrasting habitats, ii) depends on species characteristics, iii) are decreasing by distance from road and increasing sampling height, iv) are increasing by traffic intensity and v) varied by time. It can be concluded that the magnetic properties of the leaf depends on the leaf surface structure and the particulate pollution level is a good bio-indicator for monitoring spatial variation of magnetic particles in urban environments

Keywords:

air pollution , dust , road traffic , magnetic properties , plant leaves