Scientists' Contributions

Design of Biomonitoirng Programmes for Air Quality Assessment and Decision Making at Local, National and International Level

Professor Peter Williams

King's College London UK

    In 1986 Agneta Burton produced a review of biological monitoring using plants as a report of the Monitoring and Research Assessment Centre (MARC) which is a World Health Organisation (WHO) collaborating centre for environmental monitoring and assessment. In February 2000 a revised report focused on the Biomonitoring of Air Quality using Plants was produced for WHO by MARC in collaboration with the WHO collaborating centre for air quality management and air pollution control at the Federal Environment Agency, Berlin. The present paper addresses some of the fundamental issues that need to be considered if biomonitoring data is to be converted to information for management and decision making.

    Since 1986 there has been a wealth of research on the use of plants for air quality monitoring. The other presentations at this workshop clearly illustrate the advances that are being made in our understanding of the effects of exposure to air pollutants of plants both in terms of their distribution and physiology. Managers and decision-makers require that information to be presented in a clear and unequivocal way and this requirement places particular demands on researchers to design and execute their programmes with the ultimate use of the data in mind.

    Key decisions are needed in the whole programme design beginning with the selection of indicators, the selection of sites or experimental regimes, the data analyses, chemical analyses and perhaps most importantly the introduction of quality control procedures. The paper explores each of these issues in turn and raises some problems such as the lack of specificity of some indicators, the difficulty is establish causal relationships in a complex environmental pollution scenario. It is suggested that three approaches may offer particular scope for wider future development. Multivariate analysis of data can provide crucial understanding of the principal components of pollution or other environmental impacts. The development of multimetric indicators such as indices of Biotic Integrity can overcome situations where a single indicator may produce discrepancies or outliers and fail to identify causal relationships. Finally the concept of natural vegetation status compared with observed vegetation status can provide a numeric basis for comparing the degree of impact in different plant communities. All these methods have been tried in either air pollution or other pollution impact scenarios. Some suggestions are made how these and other advances can assist decision-makers and managers use plant bioindicator data at local, national and international levels.