Element accumulation performance of living and dead lichens in a large-scale transplant application
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Element accumulation performance of living and dead lichens in a large-scale transplant application Elva Cecconi 1 & Lorenzo Fortuna 2 & Marco Peplis 1 & Mauro Tretiach 1 Received: 15 June 2020 / Accepted: 23 November 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
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. Keywords Lichen transplants . Bioaccumulation . Devitalization . Interpretative scale . Pseudevernia furfuracea
Introduction 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). For this reason, their use is frequently recommended as complementary to conventional monitoring by instrumental devices (Marć et al. 2015). The wide application of biomonitoring techniques by lichens and mosses over years triggered a major research interest for the processes underlying metal accumulation (e.g. Garty et al. 1979; Brown and Beckett 1985; Tyler 1989; Elva Cecconi and Lorenzo Fortuna contributed equally to this work. Responsible Editor: Elena Maestri * Mauro Tretiach [email protected] 1
Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste, Via L. Giorgieri 10, 34127 Trieste, Italy
2
Department of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Trieste, Via L. Giorgieri 1, 34127 Trieste, Italy
Vázquez et al. 1999). These processes may be very complex, as many factors affect the element accumulation by biological systems (or even by their individual symbionts, in case of mutualistic associations; Bačkor and Loppi 2009). However, 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 s
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