Five primary sources of organic aerosols in the urban atmosphere of Belgrade (Serbia)

Abstract

Biomass burning and primary biological aerosol particles (PBAPs) represent important primary sources of organic compounds in the atmosphere. These particles and compounds are able to affect climate and human health. In the present work, using HPLC-orbitrapMS, we determined the atmospheric concentrations of molecular markers such as anhydrosugars and phenolic compounds that are specific for biomass burning, as well as the concentrations of sugars, alcohol sugars and D- and L-amino acids (D-AAs and L-AAs) for studying PBAPs in Belgrade (Serbia) aerosols collected in September–December 2008. In these samples, high levels of all these biomarkers were observed in October. Relative percentages of vanillic (V), syringic compounds (S) and p-coumaric acid (PA), as well as levoglucosan/mannosan (L/M) ratios, helped us discriminate between open fire events and wood combustion for domestic heating during the winter. L-AAs and D-AAs (1% of the total) were observed in Belgrade aerosols mainly in September–October. During open fire events, mean D-AA/L-AA (D/L) ratio values of aspartic acid, threonine, phenylalanine, alanine were significantly higher than mean D/L values of samples unaffected by open fire. High levels of AAs were observed for open biomass burning events. Thanks to four different statistical approaches, we demonstrated that Belgrade aerosols are affected by five sources: a natural source, a source related to fungi spores and degraded material and three other sources linked to biomass burning: biomass combustion in open fields, the combustion of grass and agricultural waste and the combustion of biomass in stoves and industrial plants. The approach employed in this work, involving the determination of specific organic tracers and statistical analysis, proved useful to discriminate among different types of biomass burning events

Biomarkers as indicators of fungal biomass in the atmosphere of São Paulo, Brazil

“…Arabitol and mannitol concentrations observed in our study are similar to those found by Caumo et al (2016) for São Paulo in winter of 2012 and 2013, Gosselin et al (2016) in a semiarid montane environment and Burshtein et al (2011) in Israel (Table 1). However, higher concentrations were observed in numerous studies as presented in Table 1 (Bauer et al, 2008b;Graham et al, 2003;Urban et al, 2014;Zhang et al, 2010;Rathnayake et al, 2016;Zangrando et al, 2016;Gosselin et al, 2016 -rainy period). These locations are examples of sampling sites in urban and forest environments, rendering the differences in concentrations mostly due to the difference in land use characteristics and/or sampling period.…”

“…These locations are examples of sampling sites in urban and forest environments, rendering the differences in concentrations mostly due to the difference in land use characteristics and/or sampling period. Higher concentrations are found in places that are less urbanised and with more biogenic sources, such as a tropical forest (Zhang et al, 2010), suburban area (Bauer et al, 2008b), agroindustrial area (Urban et al, 2014), rainforest (Graham et al, 2003), smaller cities Zangrando et al, 2016) and in more humid periods (Gosselin et al, 2016). Moreover, bioaerosol concentrations can vary depending on meteorological conditions (Emygdio et al, unpublished results).…”

“…Table 2 shows studies worldwide that have measured the fungal spore number concentration and mass contribution considering these biomarkers and the conversion factors given by Bauer et al (2008a). Most of these studies only mention the mannitol and arabitol fungal origin, while they focus otherwise on biomass burning (BB) or characterisation of the organic aerosol in the atmosphere in general (Caumo et al, 2016;Urban et al, 2014;Zangrando et al, 2016;Graham et al, 2003). Other studies (Table 1) considered arabitol and mannitol as important fungal biomarkers but do not estimate the fungal biomass in the atmosphere (Burshtein et al, 2011;Rathnayake et al, 2016;Liang et al, 2016).…”

Characterization of free amino acids, bacteria and fungi in size-segregated atmospheric aerosols in boreal forest: seasonal patterns, abundances and size distributions

“…2 and 3), it is likely that the observed FAAs originated from distant sources. However, FAAs and particularly glycine have been also associated with biomass burning emissions (Samy et al, 2013;Violaki and Mihalopoulos, 2010;Zangrando et al, 2016). In Finland wood burning, which is a typical type of domestic heating in winter, is the most presumable source of over one third of the PM 2.5 emissions (Laakso et al, 2003;Saarnio et al, 2012).…”

Air Quality Monitoring and Assessment: A Multidisciplinary Study

“…According to EB ratios and the location, we can conclude that Sb comes from vehicular sources. [151,164,165] or industrial (e.g., mining ores, steel plant, cement plants) [149,166,167].…”