Search results for "Metals"
showing 10 items of 2013 documents
Marine Invertebrates as Bioindicators of Heavy Metal Pollution
2014
Atmosphere, earth and water compose the environment. The presence of heavy metals in the environment has grown because of their large employment in some industrial and agricultural activities. Although these metals are terrestrial products, they flow into the sea through effluents and sewage or are directly discharged from industries placed on the seawater front. It should be considered that metals concentrations vary widely according to different seawater latitudes and depths and can be strongly influenced by fresh water discharges from heavily polluted rivers. In this review recent studies on heavy metal pollution in marine ecosystems and their organisms will be presented. Metal speciatio…
The Moss Biomonitoring Method and Neutron Activation Analysis in Assessing Pollution by Trace Elements in Selected Polish National Parks
2020
The concentrations of trace elements in feather moss Pleurozium schreberi (Brid.) Mitt. were used to indicate the relative levels of air pollution by trace elements in Polish national parks. Pleurozium schreberi was collected from nine national parks. The highest concentrations were recorded in the moss samples from the southern and most industrialised part of the country; the lowest from northern and north-eastern Poland. A comparison of data obtained from Polish national parks in the 1970s and 1990s showed a significant decrease in the concentrations of heavy metals. In the linear covariability estimation, the t quantile approach was used for multi-element comparison. A number of positive…
Environmental impact of early Basque mining and smelting recorded in a high ash minerogenic peat deposit.
2004
International audience; More than four metres of core, covering almost 5000 years of deposition, were collected in a high ash minerogenic peat deposit located in the High Aldudes valley (Basque country), an area well known for its mineral abundance, exploited from Roman Times at least.Although minerogenic peatlands are not generally considered as the best archives to reconstruct past atmospheric metal deposition history, lead isotopic geochemistry demonstrates the integrity of the Pb record at least within the three upper meters; that is to say over the last four millennia.Zn, Cd and Cumay have been widely redistributed either by biological cycling, advective groundwater movements, or diffu…
Geochemical records of limestone façades exposed to urban atmospheric contamination as monitoring tools?
2008
International audience; Magnetic susceptibility, surface rock soiling, elemental composition and lead isotope ratios were measured in surface stone samples collected at different heights of a late 19th century building in Dijon, France. We targeted four limestone facades that differ in orientation and proximity to car traffic. It seems that zinc, copper, sulphur and cadmium are present as diffuse pollutants in urban atmosphere, at least at the scale of the building studied. In contrast, lead and arsenic exhibit point sources: automotive traffic and past coal-burning fly-ash emissions; both coherent with lead isotopic composition measurements. Parameter variations primarily result from expos…
Air Quality during New Year’s Eve: A Biomonitoring Study with Moss
2021
Mosses are one of the best bioindicators in the assessment of atmospheric aerosol pollution by heavy metals. Studies using mosses allow both short- and long-term air quality monitoring. The increasing contamination of the environment (including air) is causing a search for new, cheap and effective methods of monitoring its condition. Once such method is the use of mosses in active biomonitoring. The aim of the study was to assess the atmospheric aerosol pollution with selected heavy metals (Ni, Cu, Zn, Cd, Hg and Pb) from the smoke of fireworks used during New Year’s Eve in the years 2019/2020 and 2020/2021. In studies a biomonitoring moss-bag method with moss Pleurozium schreberi (Willd. e…
Perturbation vectors to evaluate air quality using lichens and bromeliads: a Brazilian case study.
2017
10 pages; International audience; Samples of one lichen species, Parmotrema crinitum, and one bromeliad species, Tillandsia usneoides, were collected in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at four sites differently affected by anthropogenic pollution. The concentrations of aluminum, cadmium, copper, iron, lanthanum, lead, sulfur, titanium, zinc, and zirconium were determined by inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectroscopy. The environmental diagnosis was established by examining compositional changes via perturbation vectors, an underused family of methods designed to circumvent the problem of closure in any compositional dataset. The perturbation vectors between the reference s…
Data quality oriented procedure, for detailed mapping of heavy metals in urban topsoil as an approach to human health risk assessment
2021
Abstract Urban soils' health is important to the community because of the soils' potential use for recreational activities. A data quality-oriented approach to sampling design is proposed for performing soil representative surveys that gives support to defensible and statistically-based decisions. Krowoderski park in Cracow (Poland) was selected as a study case to investigate heavy metals (HMs) accumulation and to assess human risk exposure according to simulated scenarios. Statistical power was computed for optimizing the number of samples to compare HMs concentration against legal upper tolerance levels (LUTL). The samples' location was iteratively designed as random spatial distribution …
The influence of preparation methodology on the concentrations of heavy metals in Pleurozium schreberi moss samples prior to use in active biomonitor…
2020
AbstractActive biomonitoring is used to assess environmental pollution of elements such as heavy metals by indicator species such as mosses. They are used, among others, in urbanized areas where no indicator species are found. In such study areas, mosses collected from sites considered to be ecologically clean shall be exposed. In this context, it is very important to prepare the mosses properly before the exposure, so that the information received about the condition of the environment is reliable. In 2018, studies were conducted in the forested areas of southern Poland—in Opolskie Province. Pleurozium schreberi mosses were used in these studies. Atomic absorption spectrometry with flame a…
Bioavailability and assessment of heavy metal pollution in sediment cores off the Mejerda River Delta (Gulf of Tunis): How useful is a multiproxy app…
2016
International audience; Three core samples were taken from zones offshore from the Mejerda River Delta (Tunisia) and analyzed formajor and trace elements to assess their relationships with organic matter, monosulfides and carbonates, aswell as for pollution and bioavailability. Chemical speciation,ΣSEM/AVS, the enrichment factor (EF) and thegeo-accumulation index (I-geo) were used. Iron, cadmium, lead and zinc – the most frequently mined metalsin the Mejerda catchment – were found as contaminants in the offshore areas. Estimations of trace elementaccumulation using the EF and the I-geo index show that lead, and to a lesser extent zinc, are the most pollutingmetals off the Mejerda outlet. Ac…
The environmental impact of air pollution on the built heritage of historic Cairo (Egypt)
2020
In the last decades, many researchers investigated the relation between environmental pollution and the degradation phenomena on the built heritage, because of their rapid increase and growing harmfulness. Consequently, the identification of the main pollution sources has become essential to define mitigation actions against degradation and alteration phenomena of the stone materials. In this way, the present paper is focused on the study of the effect of air pollution on archaeological buildings in Historic Cairo. A multi-methodological approach was used to obtain information about the chemical composition of examined black crusts and to clarify their correlation with the air pollution, sp…