Biomonitoring and remediation by plants

Abstract

Dealing with environmental pollution promises to be one of man’s most urgent problems in the years to come. This chapter deals with different components of air pollution biomonitoring and their remediation by using different plant species of herbs, shrubs, and trees as green technology. Various methods of biomonitoring apply the whole or part of an organism to measure the exposure of a plant as well as accumulation of a pollutant. They have the great advantage to show clearly the effects of air pollutants as bioindicator plants. Bioindicators can reveal the impact and the cumulative effects of different pollutants. Phytoremediation is a set of processes such as rhizodegradation, phytostabilization, phytofiltration, phytoextraction, phytodegradation, and phytovolatilization. Through these processes plants remediate the pollutants, partially and sustainably from the atmosphere. Atmospheric gases (NO2, SO2, O3, etc.), heavy metals, and VOC pollutants are reduced by absorbing and metabolizing them into less toxic compounds by site-specific plants or through the changes in the plant genome by overexpression of pollution-fighting genes through genetic engineering.