Journal
ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT
Volume 193, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10661-020-08804-2
Keywords
Black carbon; Cities; External contamination; Intra-urban variability; Particulate matter; Soot
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [1552410]
- University of North Texas Office of the Provost, Honors College
- Department of Geography and the Environment
- Department of Studio Art
- College of Visual Arts and Design
- College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie
- Division Of Behavioral and Cognitive Sci [1552410] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The study compared EC accumulation on bird feathers at locations with different traffic volumes in urban areas, finding that feathers near a highway accumulated approximately eight times more EC on average than feathers near a university campus bus stop. This indicates that EC accumulation on feathers varies over short distances within urban areas.
Birds can serve as effective biomonitors of air pollution, yet few studies have quantified external particulate matter accumulation on bird feathers. Biomonitoring of airborne elemental carbon (EC) is of critical significance because EC is a component of particulate matter with adverse effects on air quality and human health. To assess their effectiveness for use in EC monitoring, we compared EC accumulation on bird feathers at two sites that differed in vehicular traffic volume in an urban environment within the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan Area, USA. Moulted flight feathers from domestic chickens were experimentally exposed to ambient EC pollution for 5 days in two urban microenvironments 1.5 km distant from each other that differed in traffic volume--adjacent to an interstate highway and a university campus bus stop. Feathers near the highway accumulated approximately eight times more EC (307 +/- 34 mu g m(-2) day(-1)), on average, than feathers near the bus stop (40 +/- 9 mu g m(-2) day(-1)). These findings indicate that EC accumulation on feathers varies over short distances within urban areas and that bird feathers potentially can be used for biomonitoring airborne EC.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available