GP42A-03
Biomonitoring of Air Pollution by Magnetic Measurements of Native and Transplanted Lichens; Two Case Studies Around Cement Plants

Thursday, 17 December 2015: 10:50
300 (Moscone South)
Aldo Winkler1, Luca Paoli2, Danijela Kodnik3, Fabio Candotto Carniel3, Anna Guttová4, Stefano Loppi2, Leonardo Sagnotti1 and Mauro Tretiach3, (1)Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica & Vulcanologia, Roma, Italy, (2)University of Siena, Department of Life Sciences, Siena, Italy, (3)Università degli Studi di Trieste, Dipartimento di Scienze della Vita, Trieste, Italy, (4)Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Botany, Bratislava, Slovakia
Abstract:
A cement plant is a source of dust pollution and lichens are suitable biomonitors of the impact of airborne pollutants released during cement production.

We investigated the magnetic and chemical properties of lichens exposed around two cement plants, located in SW Slovakia and in NE Italy, respectively.

We characterized the magnetic properties of the lichen Evernia prunastri exposed for 180 days at selected sites around a Slovak cement plant in order to define the magnetic mineralogy and test the correlations between the concentration-dependent magnetic parameters and the content of heavy metals and crustal elements in the thalli. In addition, we compared the magnetic properties of the transplants to those carried by native thalli of the lichen Xanthoria parietina and neighboring soils, barks and rocks. The data indicated a substantial homogenous magnetic mineralogy, with the exception of a sample collected from a basalt quarry. The transplants showed an excellent correlation between the saturation remanent magnetization (Mrs) and the concentration of Fe; the concentrations of the elements linked to cement production also correlated to Mrs values, apart from the basalt quarry sample.

In the second context, we characterized the magnetic properties of the lichen Pseudevernia furfuracea transplanted near a cement plant in NE Italy. The transplants were exposed for 2 months in 40 sites distributed in surrounding rural, urban and industrial areas. In this case, the agreement between the magnetic and elemental datasets pointed out a modest environmental impact of the cement plant compared to the neighboring industrial activities, which resulted in significantly higher values of the concentration-dependent magnetic parameters.

Magnetic analyses on lichens can expand the dataset of passive dust collectors in environmental magnetism, with the advantage, for the transplants, of precisely knowing the exposure time and the initial conditions.

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