CONTRIBUTION TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF AIR QUALITY IN A HIGHLY INDUSTRIALIZED SITE (TARANTO CITY, ITALY), BY BIOMONITORING TECHNIQUES

The city of Taranto (Southern Italy), close between large industrial plants is considered among the Italian cities most at risk of pollution, due of increased release of toxic substances in the environment. Monitoring of air quality, therefore, represents a problem of primary importance. Traditional techniques are based on the use of monitoring stations and physical chemical methods. The use of bioindicators is of considerable interest because it allows measurements on a large scale, relatively quickly at low cost. In particular, the use of mosses has gone increasingly spreading in monitoring high-risk areas for the environmental capacity to absorb atmospheric pollutants and provide integrated responses on the air quality, although there are critical issues regarding different storage capacity of the species used and the influence of environmental factors. Mosses are used to study pollution in the surroundings of particular industrial plants (e.g., thermal power plants, steel works, metal smelters, cement works etc.) and their use in metal pollution monitoring was of significant importance, and subject of several, though limited, reviews (Fernandez et al., 2007). These organisms are used as bioindicators and bioaccomulators. In the later case, the most commonly used biomonitoring techniques are of two types: active, taking advantage of carpets of mosses transplanted or using moss bags and passive ones that rely on indigenous/native peoples. The first allow to obtain information concerning the effects of pollutants on the ground assessing the air quality as a whole, even in areas lacking or deficient in mosses. The majority of investigations have utilised epiphytic mosses as Hypnum cupressiforme, Hylocomium splendents and Pleurozium schereberi; these were widely used in Europe due their abundant (Gerold et al., 2000; Oniawa, 2001). Among the pollutants, "heavy metals" are of particular interest (Schilling and Lehman, 2002) whose presence in particulate atmospheric is the result of complex interactions between natural and anthropogenic factors. This paper illustrates the use of mosses in the monitoring of air quality in a highly contaminated industrial site.The obtained results, using mosses as biomonitors of trace metals, were compared with the data of atmospheric distribution of particulate matter (ISPESL, 2006).