Overview
Warczyk and colleagues sampled mosses and European blueberry leaves along transects running up to 110 m from a Polish expressway to see how traffic deposits cadmium, chromium, copper, nickel, lead and zinc in forest plants. Mosses were the better bioindicator. The blueberry material was leaves, not fruit, so the paper reports no food concentrations.
Key numbers
- Abstract: highest moss contents in fir stands were cadmium 0.36, chromium 5.91, copper 12.5, nickel 3.26, lead 8.82 and zinc 55.28 mg/kg.
- Blueberry leaves under fir stands had the highest chromium, nickel and lead, at 1.1, 2.9 and 1.3 mg/kg (Table 2).
Methods (brief)
Unwashed leaves and mosses were air dried, ground, digested in nitric acid and analyzed by ICP-OES in triplicate. Accuracy was checked against a soil certified reference material with an 80 to 120 percent recovery window.
Evidence Fitness
Out of scope for food evidence: leaves and mosses serve as deposition monitors. No berries were measured, so it is not even a proxy for blueberry-muffin. Useful only as context on roadside contamination of forest plants.