Critical levels for ozone effects on vegetation in Europe.

Biological monitoring: lichens as bioindicators of air pollution assessment--a review.

The mechanisms which have evolved in higher plants to cope with excess sulfur in their environments are reviewed. Survival in a sulfur-rich environment is seldom achieved through avoidance of the intake of sulfur. The presence of excess sulfur in the soil or in the air usually results in an intake of excess sulfur into plants. An immediate injury by the excess sulfur taken up is, however, prevented by a series of metabolic processes. Storage of excess sulfur in a metabolically inactive compartment, i.e. the vacuole, appears to occur in most plants. The finding of a storage of glutathione is several investigations suggests that with increasing accumulation of sulfate its reduction also increases. Under these conditions the cysteine concentration in different compartments of the cell may still be maintained at a low level by the incorporation of the excess cysteine synthesized into glutathione. This peptide appears to be the storage form of reduced sulfur in higher plants. 167 references, 2 figures.

The Fate of Excess Sulfur in Higher Plants

Temporal and Spatial Variations in the Water Status of Forest Trees

Records of effects of ambient ozone pollution on vegetation have been compiled for Europe for the years 1990–2006. Sources include scientific papers, conference proceedings, reports to research funders, records of confirmed ozone injury symptoms and an international biomonitoring experiment coordinated by the ICP Vegetation. The latter involved ozone-sensitive (NC-S) and ozone-resistant (NC-R) biotypes of white clover (Trifolium repens L.) grown according to a common protocol and monitored for ozone injury and biomass differences in 17 European countries, from 1996 to 2006. Effects were separated into visible injury or growth/yield reduction. Of the 644 records of visible injury, 39% were for crops (27 species), 38.1% were for (semi-) natural vegetation (95 species) and 22.9% were for shrubs (49 species). Owing to inconsistencies in reporting effort from year to year it was not possible to determine geographical or temporal trends in the data. Nevertheless, this study has shown effects in ambient air in 18 European countries from Sweden in the north to Greece in the south. These effects data were superimposed on AOT40 (accumulated ozone concentrations over 40 ppb) and POD3gen (modelled accumulated stomatal flux over a threshold of 3 nmol m−2 s−1) maps generated by the EMEP Eulerian model (50 km × 50 km grid) that were parameterized for a generic crop based on wheat and NC-S/NC-R white clover. Many effects were found in areas where the AOT40 (crops) was below the critical level of 3 ppm h. In contrast, the majority of effects were detected in grid squares where POD3gen (crops) were in the mid-high range (>12 mmol m−2). Overall, maps based on POD3gen provided better fit to the effects data than those based on AOT40, with the POD3gen model for clover fitting the clover effects data better than that for a generic crop.

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Evidence of widespread effects of ozone on crops and (semi-)natural vegetation in Europe (1990–2006) in relation to AOT40- and flux-based risk maps

This volume details the effects of air pollutants both individually and synergistically on the higher and lower plant groups. Discussions range from the subcellular level to entire ecosystems, and cover anatomy, pathology and biochemistry of plants in relation to air pollution. Sources and costs of air pollution are overviewed, as are the mechanisms of injury. SO/sub 2/, ozone, fluorides, PAN, nitrogen oxides and particulates are all treated in detail. Interactive and system-level effects are also discussed. There are 14 chapters for which analytics have been done.

T.T. Kozlowski

Papers

Responses of Plants to Air Pollution