EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Revealing Soil and Tree Leaves Deposited Particulate Matter PTE Relationship and Potential Sources in Urban Environment

Gevorg Tepanosyan, Chiara Baldacchini and Lilit Sahakyan
Additional contact information
Gevorg Tepanosyan: The Center for Ecological-Noosphere Studies of the National Academy of Sciences, Abovian-68, Yerevan 0025, Armenia
Chiara Baldacchini: Biophysics and Nanoscience Centre, Dipartimento di Scienze Ecologiche e Bioloigche (DEB)—Università degli Studi della Tuscia, Largo dell’Università snc, 01100 Viterbo, Italy
Lilit Sahakyan: The Center for Ecological-Noosphere Studies of the National Academy of Sciences, Abovian-68, Yerevan 0025, Armenia

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 19, 1-12

Abstract: Trees play a pivotal role in improving urban environmental quality and provide several ecosystem services including the removal of pollutants from the air, such as particular matter (PM) and potentially toxic elements (PTE). Therefore, understanding the tree PM and PTE capturing potential, also in connection with plant species, is of great concern, especially in urban areas. This study aims to reveal the link between the elemental composition of PM deposited on tree leaves and soils PTE contents, as well as to rank the PM capturing efficiency of 10 different tree species growing under the impact of urban environments. This also allowed us to test the efficiency of PM deposited on tree leaves as a PTE biomonitoring and pollution source identification tool, in the two biggest urban areas of Armenia. Indeed, high contents of PTE are detected in both soil- and leaf-deposited PM from sites characterized by the presence of localized and active pollution sources (i.e., industrial unites, high traffic, etc.), which are identified by specific tracers (such as Mo, Cu, Zn, Pb, and Cd). Among the studied tree species, the highest PM amount per unit leaf area is observed for Platanus orientalis , but elm species are also identified as promising canditates to be considered for their PM removing potential, and need to be included in future more details studies.

Keywords: potentially toxic elements; urban trees; pollution; environmental compartments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/19/10412/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/19/10412/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:19:p:10412-:d:649321

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:19:p:10412-:d:649321