Tree moss. Sarah Jovan, the U.S. Forest Service ecologist who led the study, recently spoke with Christopher Dorobek about its implications for DorobekINSIDER. For this work, Jovan was a finalist in the “Promising Innovation” category of the 2017 American Service Medal (SAMMIES). The award recognizes and celebrates outstanding work in the federal government.
In 2013, she teamed up with Geoffrey Donovan,
A forestry research specialist, and the two began testing mosses collected from tree trunks and branches across Portland for dangerous metal levels. In total, they documented 346 sites. “No one had ever looked at urban air in such detail before,” Jovan says. “It was very revealing.” Suffice it to say, the results surprised them.
Neighborhoods near two stained
Showed dangerous levels of cadmium and arsenic, both of which can cause cancer. “If we take a little bit of moss from a tree, grind it up, and then overseas chinese in worldwide data extract heavy metals or other air toxins from it, it will correlate somewhat with what’s actually in the air,” Jovan says. That’s because mosses and lichens don’t have roots, she explains, but instead absorb nutrients through moisture in the atmosphere.
So researchers can observe a link
between pollutants in the organisms and those in the air. In 2016, when the Oregon Department of Environmental Protection used traditional way to get leads by utilizing seo, sem, and ppc pollutant monitors to check the Forest Service’s findings, they found cadmium levels that were almost 50 times higher than the acceptable health benchmark and arsenic levels that were more than 150 times higher.
These stained glass manufacturers
are not regulated for cadmium emissions, and they’re not tg data required to filter emissions from their glass furnaces,” Jovan says. “Basically, we used moss as a screening tool, and we zeroed in on these cadmium hotspots in Portland, and then we worked with local regulators to say, ‘Hey, you know, the moss is indicating that cadmium levels are pretty high in these communities.