Analysis of pine needles by XRF scanning techniques

Abstract

Concentrations of both essential and toxic elements in pine needles are known to be influenced by environmental factors, either directly from air pollutants or indirectly from acidification. In most previous work, mean concentrations for bulk samples of pine needles have been reported. In this investigation, elemental distributions along the length of pine needles without any visible morphological damage were studied for a number of important elements. The needles were sampled from locations with essentially sandy soils of different pH in different parts of Latvia. The variation of element concentrations along the needle length proved to be very large for some elements, e.g. Zn and Mn, whereas it was almost constant for others, e.g. Cu and Fe. For some elements, large differences between needles of different age class were observed, and also variations with soil pH and light conditions. Healthy needles of the same age class, growing under similar environmental conditions, have identical elemental concentration profiles. Scanning energy‐dispersive x‐ray fluorescence Spectrometry was used and the results were validated by independent analysis with graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The diversity and function of intestinal microorganisms in four geographic Cephalcia chuxiongica (a pine defoliator) populations

“…C. chuxiongica larvae feed on pine needles exclusively (Fan, 2017). Pine needles contain abundant cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, and some toxic components (Johansson, 1995;Viksna et al, 2001), and thus, these gut bacterial communities may benefit their hosts on food digestion. Members of the genus Wolbachia infect many species of the Arthropoda (Hilgenboecker et al, 2008) and may be necessary in parthenogenetic process (Chen et al, 2012).…”

Investigation of Soils and Pine Needles Using WDXRF and TXRF Techniques for Assessment of the Environmental Pollution of Shelekhov District, Eastern Siberia, by the Aluminum Industry and Heat Power Engineering

“…XRF methods enable fast multi-elemental analysis of soils using portable energy dispersive (EDXRF) equipment [12][13][14][15][16][17] and quantitative analysis using benchtop wavelength dispersive (WDXRF) equipment [1,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. Several XRF techniques were also developed for pine needles analysis [25][26][27][28][29][30]. However, features of the samples and applied equipment require specific approaches for sample preparation strategies and quantification procedures.…”