Atmospheric metal pollutants and environmental injustice: A methodological approach to environmental risk analysis using fuzzy logic and tree bark

Poincianella pluviosa as biomonitor of heavy metals in the municipality of Volta Redonda, RJ, Brazil

“…In Latin America alone, more than 35,000 people die every year due to air pollution-related problems (Gurgatz et al, 2016). Therefore, most countries that have advanced environmental legislation (for example, Brazil) are concerned with the regulation of atmospheric emissions (Zeri et al, 2011).…”

“…Air monitoring networks are expensive to implement and operate, and in many cases do not represent a high priority for public investment, especially in developing countries (Yi et al, 2015). Gurgatz et al (2016) still emphasize the need for ample sampling in time and space that can representatively increase its efficiency but also decrease its cost.…”

Nueva metodología para el diseño de índices de calidad ambiental basada en extensiones difusas de funciones de transformación

“…Tal es el caso del campo medioambiental, en el que frecuentemente se trabaja con información imprecisa y que, en muchas ocasiones, conlleva una carga importante de subjetividad. Por tal motivo, la aritmética difusa así como la inferencia difusa han sido aplicadas con éxito durante los últimos años en distintos tipos de valoraciones medioambientales, como son: la evaluación de los impactos ambientales de actividades o proyectos (Duarte, 2000;Peche, 2006;Peche y Rodríguez, 2009;Kaya y Kahraman, 2011;Peche y Rodríguez, 2011;Sánchez, 2015;Wieland y Gutzler, 2014;Zulueta et al, 2016); los modelos de ayuda de toma de decisiones en reciclado de residuos (Nasiri y Huang, 2008); la clasificación de residuos peligrosos (Musee et al, 2008); la evaluación de la calidad de suelos recuperados (Kaufmann et al, 2009); la gestión de áreas protegidas (Prato, 2009); la valoración y análisis de riesgos ambientales (Hu et al, 2016;Martins et al, 2016); las alternativas de reducción de contaminación acústica (Ruiz-Padillo et al, 2016); y valoraciones agrícolas (Sami et al, 2014).…”

Tree Bark, a valuable source of information on air quality

“…Scientific reports predominantly refer to determination of the elemental composition of tree bark from urban agglomerations (both traffic and agglomeration air pollution) [4, 11, 26, 31, 33-34, 38-40, 46-58], but also from industrial emitters (industrial air pollution) [2,8,13,59]. Multi-elemental analysis of the tree bark was recently used for determining air quality in Brazil in urban areas of Paranaguá [10] and São Paulo [60], Chiang Mai in northern Thailand [37], and in Italy's Liguria region [9,35]. Considering pollution from industrial emitters, metallurgical industry sites are particularly troublesome "hotspots" of pollution emission into the atmosphere.…”

“…Nevertheless, in contrast to physicochemical monitoring that provides information only about air pollution at the time of measurement, biomonitoring using living organisms provides comprehensive data on impurities accumulation in the environment for long periods of time [10,20]. Plants are particularly sensitive to changes in the air and are widely used in air monitoring.…”