Contamination scale of atmospheric deposition for assessing air quality in Albania evaluated from most toxic heavy metal and moss biomonitoring

Origin and spatial distribution of metals in moss samples in Albania: A hotspot of heavy metal contamination in Europe

“…Moss biomonitoring in Albania started in 2010/2011 when researchers from Albania joined the European Moss Survey conducted within the framework of the International Cooperative Programme on Effects of Air Pollution on Natural Vegetation and Crops, ICP Vegetation (Harmens et al, 2013). Heavy metal concentrations (As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Fe, Hg, Ni, Pb, V) in 2010/2011 moss samples of Albania have been reported in several publications (Qarri et al, 2013;2014a;2014b;Bekteshi et al, 2015;Allajbeu et al, 2016a;2016b). The present paper reports on concentrations of 37 elements, their spatial distributions in 2010/2011 moss samples, and possible contributions from different sources and processes.…”

“…Arc-GIS 10.2 was used in combination with local deterministic methods and the inverse distance weighting for mapping the spatial distribution of the factor loadings (FL site ) and for spatial interpolation. FL site is calculated as percentile of the sum of the product of individual loads of each element and respective site concentration (Barandovski et al 2008, Allajbeu et al 2016b…”

Spatial distribution and temporal trend of airborne trace metal deposition in Albania studied by moss biomonitoring

“…In addition, it has a wide range distribution in Albania (Marka and Sabovljevic, 2011) and in other European areas (Sardans et al, 2005). It is used in our previous biomonitoring study (Lazo et al, 2018;Allajbeu et al, 2017;Bekteshi et al, 2015;Qarri et al, 2013) and in European trace element biomonitoring (Harmens et al, , 2010(Harmens et al, , 2008. Thus, it is useful for comparing the data with the other areas of Europe (Sardans et al, 2005).…”

“…Macedonia. The optimal conditions for each analytical technique are given by Stafilov et al, (2017). Hg was determined by cold vapor atomic absorption spectrometry (CVAAS) (Varian 10+) and homemade cold vapor system (Lazo and Cullaj, 2002) at the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Tirana.…”

“…The detection limits of the elements were calculated as 3SD of the lowest instrumental measurements of the blanks, and were reported by Stafilov et al, (2017) on previous publications.…”