Plants as Pollution Sentinels for Improved Health in the Built Environment

CBET 1336877密苏里科技大学乔尔·G·伯肯维管植物与周围环境密切互动，从地面提取水分、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，污染物蒸汽可能会穿过土壤，在一个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。这个项目将提高我们对污染物如何在土壤、工厂和建筑物之间移动，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，植物非常擅长识别蒸汽入侵风险的区域，因为无论是地下还是地上，植被占据的环境体积与住宅建筑相似。在这个项目中，将在温室和目前受污染的田间地点对植物进行研究，以确定植物吸收土壤污染的速度。在野外研究中，我们将确定植物根部取样的三维体积。所获得的知识将更好地确定污染物在环境中的去向和迁移，特别是在污染物在土壤中不均匀分布的蒸汽入侵情况下。更好地了解污染物动态以及植物与环境之间的相互作用将导致更准确地预测人们在家中面临的潜在风险。除了这些科学进展外，还将开发和应用新的分析和统计方法，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的四个维度的完整系统。植物取证领域擅长快速和廉价地评估威胁。这对公众健康大有裨益，特别是在缺乏经济激励和公共知识的地区。此外，仅仅是钻机和穿着防护装备的工人的存在，就会给潜在的责任方带来负罪感的形象，并可能引发毫无根据的担忧。这些用于蒸汽入侵的植物法医方法将不需要进入家庭进行初步评估，因此大大减少了潜在的不必要的警报或对个人空间的侵入。这些数据和方法将通过树木污染调查在美国和国际上在八个伙伴国家之间广泛共享和分发。(PIT)计划，PI是其创始合作伙伴。广泛而迅速的传播将导致这一努力的结果，影响到许多研究人员，以及他们作为保护人类健康全球努力的一部分，在划定和修复环境污染物方面所做的努力。总而言之，植物-污染物在时间和空间上相互作用的知识将被应用于具有先前特征的蒸汽入侵的地点，以将植物的性能模拟为蒸汽入侵生物传感器。如果成功，该项目将提供一种低成本、可持续的筛查工具，以快速预测受污染地点的居民面临的威胁，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.