Assessing the Potential of Urban Trees to Accumulate Potentially Toxic Elements: A Network Approach
2023
Authors:
Matić, MarijaPavlović, Dragana
Perović, Veljko
Čakmak, Dragan
Kostić, Olga
Mitrović, Miroslava
Pavlović, Pavle
Document Type:
Article (Published version)
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract:
In urbanized areas, mitigating the negative effects of pollutants from various anthropogenic
sources is one of the most important issues in planning urban functioning and development. In this
sense, urban vegetation plays one of the most important roles. The aim of this study was to investigate
the performance of network analysis (NA) as a novel and potential method for determining different
associations between potentially toxic elements (PTEs) in leaves of urban trees, their accumulation
capacity and ecophysiological response to different types of pollution in urban environments. The
results of NA showed that there is no association between elements in species that have lower or
higher efficiency in uptake of PTEs, leading to the conclusion that the elements do not depend on
mutual association but on accumulation itself. It was also found that there are differences in the
content of photosynthetic pigments and carotenoids among the studied species, but these differences
are not reflected in the values of the photosynthetic efficiency parameters. Overall, the studied species
have good ecophysiological potential for growth and existence in the urban environment, despite
the varying ability to accumulate elements and the different associations between them. This is the
first study to investigate the interactions between PTEs in leaves of urban tree species using NA and
provides a good basis for future research under different environmental conditions.
Keywords:
urban trees; potentially toxic elements; network analysis; photosynthetic efficiency; photosynthetic pigmentsSource:
Forests, 2023, 14, 11, 2116-Funding / projects:
- Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovation of the Republic of Serbia, institutional funding - 200007 (University of Belgrade, Institute for Biological Research 'Siniša Stanković') (RS-MESTD-inst-2020-200007)