Magnetic response to air pollution recorded by soil and dust-loaded leaves in a changing industrial environment

Evaluation of semi-arid arable soil heavy metal pollution by magnetic susceptibility in the Linfen basin of China

“…The v lf values of the soils ranged from 47.05 � 10 À 8 m 3 kg À 1 to 199.26 � 10 À 8 m 3 kg À 1 , with median value 88.43 � 10 À 8 m 3 kg À 1 (Table 1). Similar values of v lf between 47 � 10 À 8 m 3 kg À 1 to 141 � 10 À 8 m 3 kg À 1 , with median value 93 � 10 À 8 m 3 kg À 1 were previously reported by Cao et al (2015) in the Linfen agricultural area. It is possible that atmospheric fall-out released from automobile exhaust and coal burning might have contributed to the minor increase of median value compared to our samples.…”

“…The average value of v fd was larger than 6% in all samples (Table 1), which is within a similar range to values determined in the agricultural soil of Linfen by Cao et al (2015). The value reported here indicates the presence of a significant proportion of fine super paramagnetic (SP) grains rather than coarser grained particles, which tend to lead to lower values of v fd .…”

“…The coefficients of variation (CV) ranged from 0.09 to 0.35 indicating minor variability. The concentrations of Zn, Ni, and Cd were all slightly higher than those that have been previously reported in the other agricultural soils excluding Linfen (Liao et al 2007;Lu et al 2012;Liu et al 2015;Cao et al 2015), while Cu was lower than in the other agricultural soils (Table 2), indicating soil contamination of heavy metal as a result of excessive fertilization and pesticide application. The ordinary kriging interpolation method for heavy metal was used for the spatial distribution maps.…”

“…Linfen city is well known for intense coal mining, coke, iron-steel heavy industry (Yin et al 2013;Cao et al 2015). The Lüliang and Zhongtiao Mountain is situated in the west and east of Linfen, respectively.…”

Role of Plant Leaves in Removing Airborne Dust and Associated Metals on Beijing Roadsides

“…With urban transport development, traffic-derived pollutants become an increasing problem (Walsh and Shah, 1997;Ning and Sioutas, 2010;Cao et al, 2015) and have been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular disease, birth and developmental defects, cancer (Hei, 2010) and so on. According to WHO (2003), the life expectancy of urban residents in strongly polluted areas could decrease by over one year, particularly for children and people with lung and heart disease.…”