Plants as Pollution Sentinels for Improved Health in the Built Environment

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CBET 1336877Joel G. BurkenMissouri University of Science and TechnologyVascular plants interact intimately with their surroundings, extracting water, nutrients and contaminants from the ground. The ability to draw in contaminants allows plants to act as sensors of environmental pollution below the ground and also in buildings. If contamination is present in the ground near a building, contaminant vapors can move through soil and transport into the building in a process known as vapor intrusion. Vapor intrusion into homes can pose a considerable health risk. This project will improve our understanding of how pollutants move between soil, plants and buildings, and how time and distance affect outcomes. Currently, assessing the threat of vapor intrusion is expensive and slow, particularly when compared to the use of plants as biosensors. The core hypothesis is that plants are very good at identifying areas of vapor intrusion risk, as vegetation occupies a similar environmental volume as residential buildings, both below and above ground. In this project, plants will be studied in a greenhouse and at currently contaminated field sites to determine how rapidly plants draw in soil pollution. In field studies, we will determine the 3-dimensional volume sampled by plant roots. The knowledge gained will better define contaminant fate and transport in the environment, particularly in vapor intrusion scenarios where pollution is not uniformly distributed in the soil. A better understanding of contaminant dynamics and interactions between plants and the environment will lead to more accurate ways of predicting potential risks to people in their homes. In addition to these scientific advances, new methods, both analytical and statistical, will be developed and applied with particular focus on vapor intrusion. This research will span from the fundamental molecular scale, to multimedia contaminant transport, to full scale systems that span the four dimensions of space and time. The field of phytoforensics excels at assessing threats rapidly and inexpensively. This is of great benefit to public health, particularly in areas where the economic incentive and public knowledge are lacking. Additionally, the mere presence of a drill rig and workers in protective gear creates the image of guilt for potentially responsible parties and could raise unwarranted concerns. These phytoforensic methods for vapor intrusion will not require entering homes for initial assessments, thereby greatly reducing the potentially unnecessary alarm or intrusion into personal space. The data and methods will be shared broadly and distributed in the US and internationally, among eight partner nations, via the ?Pollution Investigations by Trees? (PIT) program of which the PI is a founding partner. The broad and rapid dissemination will lead to results of this endeavor impacting many researchers and their efforts in delineating and remediating environmental pollutants as part of the global effort to protect human health. Collectively, knowledge of plant-contaminant interactions in time and space will be applied to sites with previously characterized vapor intrusion to model the performance of plants as vapor intrusion biosensors. If successful, this project will provide a low-cost, sustainable screening tool to rapidly anticipate threats to inhabitants at contaminated sites, thereby protecting a much larger population of at-risk residents.