Effect of vehicle emissions on the morphological and physiological changes of Taraxacum officinale web

Abstract

Road transport is one of the main pollutants of atmospheric air and soil in modern cities, therefore, an important issue is the comprehensive diagnosis of the state of the environment, which can be carried out by phytoindication methods, and which make it possible to comprehensively assess the environmental risks of the roadside environment for living organisms. The article analyzes the morphological and physiological changes of Taraxacum officinale Web. that occurred under the influence of vehicle emissions. For research, we chose a territory with significant aerotechnogenic loads due to both stationary sources of pollution and traffic flows – the southwestern district of the city for the analysis of plants, the following indicators were studied: mass of plants; leaf length; proportion of altered forms; ascorbic acid content; chlorophyll concentration. In the study, biometric, spectrophotometric and statistical methods were used. The results of the studies showed that in all plants inhibition of parameters was observed in comparison with the control samples. An analysis of the tightness of the relationship between the morphophysiological parameters of the plant, the traffic intensity and the distance from the road were influenced by the average mass of plants (r=0.97) in the area with heavy traffic, the content of chlorophyll (r=0.92) in the same area, the proportion of altered forms (r=-0.94). The correlation coefficient of the proportion of altered forms is negative, since the number of altered forms decreases with increasing distance from the road. It was found, that content of chlorophyll depends on traffic intensity and the distance from the road (the correlation coefficient ranged from 0.88–0.97). Indicators of leaf length and vitamin C content turned out to be less informative, since there is no clear relationship between these indicators and distance from the road (r=0.54), although with an increase in the distance from the highway, there is a slight increase in leaf length, but the content of vitamin C did not show depending on the distance to the road. The further developments lies in the refinement of the information content of such an indicator as the content of ascorbic acid in order to use it to indicate invisible changes in the vegetation cover.