Hyperspectral biomonitoring: air quality and the city (R-5882)

A significant proportion of Europe's population lives in urban areas where exceedances of air quality standards occur and pose serious health risks. A major contribution to the urban air pollution is provided by burning of fossil fuels in road transport, with the emission of particular matter (PM). PM pollution is causing tremendous costs to society due to a significant increase in health problems and morbidity. To be able to make reliable risk assessments and take adequate urban management decisions, it is, therefore, of the utmost importance to get a detailed insight in the spatial distribution of air pollution. As sessile organisms, plants in urban areas are unable to avoid these stresses and thus are constantly influenced by numerous air pollutants. As conventional air quality monitoring stations only provide coarse-scale information on exposure to pollutants, a growing interest has risen in monitoring and modelling urban air quality in ways to obtain information with a high spatial resolution. One of the possibilities of high spatial resolution monitoring is biomonitoring of urban vegetation. Various techniques exist for biomonitoring of urban vegetation. However, many techniques needs further development, or were never tested for their biomonitoring potential. Especially, the dorsiventral leaf asymmetry (the difference between the upper and lower leaf side occurring for most deciduous species), and the resulting differences in hyperspectral leaf reflectance, is hardly considered in any (remote sensing) biomonitoring approach. Therefore, the overall objective of this research proposal is to develop, test and validate a plant-based passive biomonitoring methodology based on hyperspectral observations and considering leaf asymmetry. In this project we will make use of a dual approach, i.e.: (1) large solitary trees growing in various contrasting urban environments in terms of air pollution used for scaling up exercises from leaf to canopy, and (2) trees spatially distributed over the entire urban area for mapping purposes.

Keywords:air quality, Biomonitoring

Disciplines:General biology, Plant biology

Project type:Collaboration project