Monitoring epiphytic lichen biodiversity todetect environmental quality and air pollution:the case study of Roccamonfina Park(Campania Region - Italy)

Bio-monitoring of air pollution, i.e. monitoring environmental pollution through the use of living organisms (Nimis & Skert, 1999), may be based either on the tendency of some organism to accumulate pollutants in their tissues (bio-accumulation) or on the changes that occur in the composition of animal and plant communities after exposure to pollutants (bioindication). Compared to instrumental monitoring, the use of bio-monitors allows to measure as a whole the global effect that abiotic and biotic factors exert on biota, what is not possible by just analyzing the concentrations of single selected pollutants in the environment. Bio-monitoring provides useful information about the global conditions affecting the environment over a given area. Of course it should not be considered as a substitute of instrumental monitoring, but rather, a necessary complement of it. It may also be suited to screen areas subjected to any risk of contamination, so helping to plan landscape policies and to set land nets of air quality (ANPA, 2001). Bio-monitoring of air pollutants can be passive or active. Passive methods observe organisms growing naturally within the area of interest. Active methods detect the presence of air pollutants by placing test organisms of known response and genotype into the study area (Szczepaniak & Biziuk, 2003). In this study, lichen distribution was examined in a district of Campania region to monitor the evolution of air quality at landscape scale. A new methodological approach was tried by overlapping the results of bio-monitoring samplings to land cover maps, in order to highlight the relations between air pollution and land use patterns (Pinho et al., 2004; Paoli et al., 2006; Pinho et al., 2008). The main objectives of this work were the following: to evaluate air quality on the studied area with the aid of IBL index, and reporting geo-referenced data on a thematic map; to relate lichen distribution and biodiversity to land use spatial patterns; to put the basis for a comparative analysis focused on changes induced by the present socio-economic evolution of the plain, from agriculture to industrial and tertiary; to provide a reproducible protocol for monitoring air quality, identifying clusters of lichen species linked to particular land use models and formulating previsions about environmental quality on areas characterized by similar dynamics. measuring lichen biodiversity through the IBL index allowed us to characterize the state of environment on the studied area. This method put the basis for a wider study on the dynamic evolution of a district interested by a process of industrial reconversion very close to a natural reserve. A good responsiveness of statistical clustering towards geo-statistical features of lands was found, confirming the reliability of IBL index as an indicator of environmental quality has been confirmed by statistical clustering towards geostatistical features of LC/LU (Land cover/Land Use). Moreover, the arrangement of lichen species is indicative not only of the environmental quality on a local scale, but also of the complex set of variables related to land use patterns at landscape level.