An Investigation on the Usability of Grass in Short Term Detection of Traffic-Related Pollution

Abstract

The metal pollution monitoring caused by traffic is a costly application in which appropriate equipment is required as well. In order to avoid such a high cost, monitoring sessions are carried out when they are highly crucial to do. The difference of this study is that the usability of grass in biomonitoring while detecting the pollution caused by traffic in short term was discussed. Considering that grass can grow in a short time even in small areas that it is an all-season plant, the usability of grass as a short term biomonitoring was examined regarding the traffic pollution in Eskisehir's 15 urban roadside locations, a province of Turkey. In this study, 15 days later, samples were collected and copper, iron, nickel, lead and zinc analyses were performed. Heavy metals were determined by ICP-OES in all samples after acid digestion. The results were analyzed statistically by using SPSS 10 software at p < 0.05. The linearity analysis revealed the relationship between pollution and traffic density. The metal levels were significantly different than the corresponding levels at the medium and low traffic density roads. The correlation coefficient found each polluting metals as approximately 0.9 shows that grass can be used in short term biomonitoring of pollution caused by traffic.