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Abstract
Nowadays, the huge production of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is one of the most strongly felt environmental issues. Consequently, the European Union (EU) delivers laws and regulations for better waste management, identifying the essential requirements for waste disposal operations and the characteristics that make waste hazardous to human health and the environment. In Italy, environmental regulations define, among other things, the characteristics of sites to be classified as “potentially contaminated”. From this perspective, the Basilicata region is currently one of the Italian regions with the highest number of potentially polluted sites in proportion to the number of inhabitants. This research aimed to identify the possible effects of potentially toxic element (PTE) pollution due to waste disposal activities in three “potentially contaminated” sites in southern Italy. The area was affected by a release of inorganic pollutants with values over the thresholds ruled by national/European legislation. Potential physiological efficiency variations of vegetation were analyzed through the multitemporal processing of satellite images. Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images were used to calculate the trend in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) over the years. The multitemporal trends were analyzed using the median of the non-parametric Theil–Sen estimator. Finally, the Mann–Kendall test was applied to evaluate trend significance featuring areas according to the contamination effects on investigated vegetation. The applied procedure led to the exclusion of significant effects on vegetation due to PTEs. Thus, waste disposal activities during previous years do not seem to have significantly affected vegetation around targeted sites.
Highlights
Introduction iationsAs early as the 1970s, a “new type of forest decline” [1] was observed almost simultaneously in various countries and in very different climatic and geo-pedological conditions and affecting different species of conifers and broad-leaved trees
The analyses for the identification of the multitemporal trends of the vegetation were conducted on a circular area with a radius of 1 km starting from each site’s centroid
The consideration underlying this assumption was that any possible variation in the vegetation functional efficiency induced by the anthropogenic stresses was evident in an area not far from potentially polluting sources [126,127,128,129]
Summary
Introduction iationsAs early as the 1970s, a “new type of forest decline” [1] was observed almost simultaneously in various countries and in very different climatic and geo-pedological conditions and affecting different species of conifers and broad-leaved trees. The symptoms shown were not attributed to the classic biotic and abiotic stresses that cause a reduction in growth, a reduction in the leaf surface, the discoloration of the leaves, an arrest of or reduction in diameter increment, or a reduction in root phytomass and crown transparency. The phenomenon, whose causes have not yet been fully established, is still the subject of scientific research, but the contribution of Potential Toxic Elements (PTEs) in the decline of vegetation functionality is well known and established. Among the PTEs, heavy metals (HMs) play a fundamental role, so much so that the European Environment Agency (EEA) has highlighted the importance [2] of the continuous monitoring of HM emissions.
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