Ricerc@Sapienza

An innovative approach, based on HyperSpectral Imaging (HSI), was developed in order to set up an efficient method to analyze marine microplastic litter. HSI was applied to samples collected by surface-trawling plankton nets from several parts of the world (i.e. Arctic, Mediterranean, South Atlantic and North Pacific). Reliable information on abundance, size, shape and polymer type for the whole ensemble of plastic particles in each sample was retrieved from single hyperspectral images.

The aim of this study is to develop a new methodology based on optical sensors able to recognize and characterize microplastics collected in the marine environment. In recent years, this pollution represents an environmental emergency with serious effects on human health and marine organisms. The study was carried out on microplastics collected in different geographical areas.

Environmentally sound management of plastic waste is a fundamental achievement in order to move towards circular economy and sustainable patterns of consumption and production. In this work, different emerging applications for plastic waste monitoring and recycling based on hyperspectral imaging (HSI) technology, coupled with chemometric logics, are presented and discussed. Marine microplastics, one of the main environmental concerns, can be recognized and characterized by HSI, providing at the same time information related to the particle morphological and morphometrical attributes.

Despite a vast amount of literature has focused on trace element (TE) contamination in Antarctica during the last decades, the assessment of the main pathways driving TE transfer to the biota is still an overlooked issue. This limits the ability to predict how variations in sea-ice dynamics and productivity due to climate change will affect TE allocation in the food web.

The dynamic and hierarchical structure of rivers, together with disruption of the natural river continuum by human activities, makes it difficult to identify and locate sources of nutrient pollution affecting receiving waters and observe its dispersion, thus impairing monitoring efforts. The identification of reliable indicators of anthropogenic nitrogen inputs in catchments is therefore key to achieving effective management of polluted rivers.

Climate change significantly modifies terrestrial ecosystems and vegetation activity, yet little is known about how climate change and ozone pollution interact to affect forest health. Here we compared the trends of two metrics widely used to protect forests against negative impacts of ozone pollution, the AOT40 (Accumulated Ozone over Threshold of 40 ppb) which only depends on surface air ozone concentrations, and the POD (Phytotoxic Ozone Dose) which relies on the amount of ozone uptaken by plants through stomata.