Urban-scale variation in pollen concentrations: a single station is insufficient to characterize daily exposure
- PDF / 1,823,864 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 547.087 x 737.008 pts Page_size
- 28 Downloads / 163 Views
(0123456789().,-volV) (0123456789().,-volV)
ORIGINAL PAPER
Urban-scale variation in pollen concentrations: a single station is insufficient to characterize daily exposure Daniel S. W. Katz
. Stuart A. Batterman
Received: 31 May 2019 / Accepted: 7 April 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Epidemiological analyses of airborne allergenic pollen often use concentration measurements from a single station to represent exposure across a city, but this approach does not account for the spatial variation of concentrations within the city. Because there are few descriptions of urban-scale variation, the resulting exposure measurement error is unknown but potentially important for epidemiological studies. This study examines urban-scale variation in pollen concentrations by measuring pollen concentrations of 13 taxa over 24-h periods twice weekly at 25 sites in two seasons in Detroit, Michigan. Spatiotemporal variation is described using cumulative distribution functions and regression models. Daily pollen concentrations across the 25 stations varied considerably, and the average quartile coefficient of dispersion was 0.63. Measurements at a single site explained 3–85% of the variation at other sites, depending on the taxon, and 95% prediction intervals of pollen concentrations generally spanned one to two orders of magnitude. These results demonstrate
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10453-020-09641-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. D. S. W. Katz (&) S. A. Batterman Environmental Health Sciences, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, 1415 Washington Heights Rd., Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected]
considerable heterogeneity of pollen levels at the urban scale and suggest that the use of a single monitoring site will not reflect pollen exposure over an urban area and can lead to sizable measurement error in epidemiological studies, particularly when a daily time step is used. These errors might be reduced by using predictive daily pollen levels in models that combine vegetation maps, pollen production estimates, phenology models, and dispersion processes, or by using coarser time steps in the epidemiological analysis. Keywords Aeroallergens Allergenic pollen Allergic rhinitis Exposure misclassification Exposure measurement error
1 Introduction Exposure to allergenic pollen can trigger allergic rhinitis, allergic conjunctivitis, and asthma attacks (Bousquet et al. 2008; La Rosa et al. 2013; Linneberg et al. 2002; Salo et al. 2011). Sensitization to pollen is common, and estimates of allergic rhinitis prevalence range from 10 to 30% (D’Amato et al. 2007; Mims 2014). Suffering individuals endure substantial reductions in quality of life and economic productivity (Blaiss et al. 2018; Meltzer 2016; Meltzer et al. 2009), and estimates of the health burden range to 5 million
123
Aerobiologia
lost school and work days annually in the USA (Nathan 2007). In Sweden, the economic cost of allergic rhini
Data Loading...
