Location
Chicago, Illinois
Date
02 May 2013, 4:05 pm - 4:25 pm
Abstract
Plants directly interact with surrounding water, air, and soil, collecting and storing chemicals and elements from the surrounding environment. Tree coring methods have shown that groundwater contamination can be assessed without directly sampling the groundwater. In this work, two new and innovative sampling methods that place sampling devices inside the plant, i.e. “in-planta”, were developed to access this valuable data that can direct and perhaps replace traditional methods for contaminated-site investigations. Traditional site assessments may be limited due to time, site access, and expense, resulting in incomplete understanding of the contaminated plumes and inefficient remedial approaches. The new techniques presented include placing established solid phase microextraction fibers (SPMEs) and newly developed solid phase samplers (SPSs) that have greater sensitivity and reproducibility and can also provide repeated sampling of the same trees with minimal damage, offering new possibilities in using plants to monitor contaminated sites as well as doing initial investigations. These methods are also much faster and can be accomplished with little of no property and ecological damage, and with amazing acceptance by property owners.
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Meeting Name
7th Conference of the International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering
Publisher
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Document Version
Final Version
Rights
© 2013 Missouri University of Science and Technology, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
File Type
text
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Burken, Joel G. and Waltermire, Kendra M., "Phytoforensics: Soil and Groundwater Sampling Without Soil or Groundwater!" (2013). International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering. 5.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icchge/7icchge/session17/5
Phytoforensics: Soil and Groundwater Sampling Without Soil or Groundwater!
Chicago, Illinois
Plants directly interact with surrounding water, air, and soil, collecting and storing chemicals and elements from the surrounding environment. Tree coring methods have shown that groundwater contamination can be assessed without directly sampling the groundwater. In this work, two new and innovative sampling methods that place sampling devices inside the plant, i.e. “in-planta”, were developed to access this valuable data that can direct and perhaps replace traditional methods for contaminated-site investigations. Traditional site assessments may be limited due to time, site access, and expense, resulting in incomplete understanding of the contaminated plumes and inefficient remedial approaches. The new techniques presented include placing established solid phase microextraction fibers (SPMEs) and newly developed solid phase samplers (SPSs) that have greater sensitivity and reproducibility and can also provide repeated sampling of the same trees with minimal damage, offering new possibilities in using plants to monitor contaminated sites as well as doing initial investigations. These methods are also much faster and can be accomplished with little of no property and ecological damage, and with amazing acceptance by property owners.
