A Review on Air Pollution Monitoring and Management Using Plants With Special Reference to Foliar Dust Adsorption and Physiological Stress Responses

Air pollution has become a major environmental risk as far as public health is concerned. It has been proposed that reduction in levels of air pollution may result in lessening of the global burden of disease. Monitoring and management of air pollution has been carried out for a long time. However, the causes of air pollution and effects of air pollution on humans, animals, and plants are yet to be fully unraveled. Moreover, management of air pollution is facing challenges due to lack of availability of suitable tools and techniques. The latter half of the 19th century was dominated by research on the recognition and description of different pollutants and to some extent toward the search for tools and techniques to control and reduce air pollution. One of the major air pollutants is atmospheric particulate matter. Resuspended roadside dust is one of the sources of these particulate matters. Resuspended dust is composed of several elements from different sources. The elemental composition of these dust particulates varies with their size and the size sometimes is dependent on the sources. The atmospheric dust particles find their way onto the surfaces of leaves on the roadside either under gravity or via impaction due to wind. Assessment of the elemental distribution in dust adsorbed over leaves as well as in the leaf tissues makes plants as suitable biomonitor of air pollution. Moreover, physiological alterations in plants also can indicate the level of pollution in the respective areas. Hence plants can be used as biomonitors and bioindicators of air pollution. Dust interception capacities of plants can be exploited to use them as sinks for atmospheric particulate pollutants. Literatures available on these aspects are reviewed and the highlights are depicted in this review paper. This review report has five groups (i.e., reports) on worsening air quality around the world, studies on dust interception capacity of plants, physiological alterations in plants in response to dust load, elemental distribution in different environmental samples (ambient air, dust from plant canopies, roadside dust and plant tissues), and elemental and mineralogical profiling of urban dust particulates with respect to size distribution.