Abstract
In bioaccumulation studies, sample devitalization through acid washing or oven drying is commonly applied to enhance the element accumulation efficiency of moss sample. Such aspect, however, has never been considered in biomonitoring surveys using lichens. In this study, the trace element accumulation performance of living (L) and dead (D) samples of the lichen Pseudevernia furfuracea was compared by a side-by-side transplanting at 40 sites in a large, mixed land use area of NE Italy for 8 weeks. Devitalization was achieved without any physico-chemical treatments, by storing lichen samples in a dark cool room for 18 months. Health status of lichens was assessed before and after the sample exposure by chlorophyll fluorescence emission. Although elemental analysis of the two exposed sample sets revealed a similar trace element pollution scenario, the content of 13 out of the 24 selected elements was higher in D samples. By expressing results as exposed-to-unexposed (EU) ratio, D samples show a higher bioaccumulation signal in 80% of transplant sites for Al, Ca, Fe, Hg, Pb and Ti. Overall, the health status of lichen samples might lead to interpretational discrepancies when EU ratio is classified according to the recently proposed bioaccumulation scale.
Highlights
Lichens and mosses are highly performing bioaccumulators, which provide reliable information on the source apportioning of airborne elements and their depositional patterns (Giordano et al 2013)
principal component (PC) 1 is negatively associated with the EU ratio of most elements (Al, Ca, Cd, Co, Fe, Hg, Pb, Sr, Ti and Zn) and positively with that of K, Na, P and S
This axis is negatively and positively correlated with living and dead lichen samples, indicating a higher bioaccumulation of elements placed at negative scores of PC 1 in dead samples, and contextual higher EU ratios of K, Na, P and S in living samples
Summary
Lichens and mosses are highly performing bioaccumulators, which provide reliable information on the source apportioning of airborne elements and their depositional patterns (Giordano et al 2013). In spite of such interest and the growing supportive role of biomonitoring in environmental forensics and decisionmaking processes, the research aimed at enhancing the methodological consistency of biomonitoring techniques has often followed separated pathways for mosses and lichens. This produced unbalanced outcomes in terms of available protocols, supra-regional sampling networks, data quality and comparability (Cecconi et al 2019a). As a matter of fact, such an aspect was frequently addressed in the framework of active “bryomonitoring” (i.e. biomonitoring by moss transplants, of which the moss bag technique is the most used approach, e.g. Aničić et al 2009a, b; Basile et al 2009; Giordano et al 2009; Debén et al 2016), whereas it has scarcely been faced for lichens
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