Plants as Pollution Sentinels for Improved Health in the Built Environment

Joel G.密苏里大学伯肯分校维管植物与周围环境密切相关，从地面提取水、营养物质和污染物。植物吸收污染物的能力使其成为地下和建筑物中环境污染的传感器。如果建筑物附近的地面存在污染物，污染物蒸汽可以通过土壤移动并在称为蒸汽侵入的过程中进入建筑物。蒸汽侵入家庭可能会造成相当大的健康风险。该项目将提高我们对污染物如何在土壤，植物和建筑物之间移动，以及时间和距离如何影响结果的理解。目前，评估蒸汽入侵的威胁既昂贵又缓慢，特别是与使用植物作为生物传感器相比。核心假设是，植物非常善于识别蒸汽入侵风险区域，因为植被占据了与住宅建筑相似的环境体积，无论是地面以下还是地面以上。在该项目中，将在温室和目前受污染的田间地点研究植物，以确定植物吸收土壤污染的速度。在实地研究中，我们将确定植物根系取样的三维体积。所获得的知识将更好地确定污染物在环境中的归宿和迁移，特别是在污染物在土壤中分布不均匀的蒸汽侵入情况下。更好地了解污染物动力学以及植物与环境之间的相互作用，将有助于更准确地预测人们家中的潜在风险。除了这些科学进步，新的方法，分析和统计，将开发和应用，特别侧重于蒸汽入侵。这项研究将从基本的分子尺度，到多媒体污染物传输，再到跨越空间和时间四维的全尺度系统。植物法医学领域擅长快速、廉价地评估威胁。 这对公共卫生大有裨益，特别是在缺乏经济激励和公众知识的领域。此外，仅仅是钻机和穿着防护装备的工人的出现就给潜在的责任方造成了有罪的形象，并可能引起不必要的担忧。这些用于蒸气入侵的植物法医方法不需要进入家庭进行初步评估，从而大大减少了潜在的不必要的警报或对个人空间的入侵。数据和方法将广泛共享和分布在美国和国际上，八个伙伴国家，通过？树木污染调查？(PIT)PI是创始合伙人之一的计划。广泛而迅速的传播将导致这一奋进的结果，影响许多研究人员及其在划定和修复环境污染物方面的努力，作为保护人类健康的全球努力的一部分。总的来说，植物与污染物在时间和空间上的相互作用的知识将被应用到先前表征的蒸汽入侵的站点，以模拟植物作为蒸汽入侵生物传感器的性能。如果成功，该项目将提供一种低成本、可持续的筛查工具，以迅速预测污染场地居民面临的威胁，从而保护更多的高危居民。

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.