Frontasyeva M., Harmens H., Uzhinskiy A., Chaligava O. Mosses as biomonitors of air pollution: 2015/2016 survey on heavy metals, nitrogen and POPs in Europe and beyond

Dubna, 2020. — 136 p.The first moss survey at the European scale was conducted in 1990 and has been repeated every five years since then. At first, the survey focussed on monitoring the concentration of selected heavy metals as an indication of atmospheric heavy metal pollution and deposition. In 2005, determination of the nitrogen concentration in mosses was included for the first time. Since 2010, some countries also determined the concentration of selected persistent organic pollutants (POPs), particularly polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), at a selected number of sites. The idea of using mosses as biomonitors of atmospheric deposition is based on the fact that carpet forming, ectohydric mosses obtain most elements and other compounds directly from precipitation and dry deposition; there is little uptake from the substrate they grow on.