Biomonitoring of the Urban Habitat Quality through Chlorophyll Fluorescence." (R-8168)

Poor air quality is now listed as the fourth biggest health threat worldwide and interest for monitoring the air quality increases in order to reduce costs for health care. This biomonitoring strategy relies on chlorophyll fluorescence, which is the light re-emitted back into the atmosphere by plants. Chlorophyll fluorescence is one of the three major pathways "besides heat dissipation and non-photochemical quenching (e.g. xanthophyll cycle)" for plants to get rid of excessive absorbed light and avoid production of harmful levels of reactive oxygen species. Plants photosynthesize less efficiently when exposed to stress. Consequently, more of the absorbed light is excessive and chlorophyll fluorescence increases. Plants could serve as small monitoring stations and replace the coarsely distributed weather stations to map the air pollution with much higher spatial resolution. Chlorophyll fluorescence measurements do not require contact with the leaf surface and is therefore suitable for remote sensing of large areas. However, a lot of environmental parameters cloud the correlation between chlorophyll fluorescence and the pollution degree. For example the chlorophyll concentration, leaf water content, leaf structure (thickness) and environmental conditions are only a few parameters that influence the chlorophyll fluorescence signal and make the interpretation a difficult job. The application of several devices analyzing different physiological mechanisms behind fluorescence is one of the strengths of this project.

Keywords:biomonitoring

Disciplines:Plant biology, Agricultural plant production, Horticultural production