RT Journal Article
T1 Assessment of environmental risk areas based on airborne pollen patterns as a response to land use and land cover distribution
A1 Rojo Úbeda, Jesús
A1 Cervigón, Patricia
A1 Ferencova, Zuzana
A1 Cascón, Ángel
A1 Galán Díaz, Javier
A1 Romero Morte, Jorge
A1 Sabariego Ruiz, Silvia
A1 Torres Muñoz, Margarita
A1 Gutiérrez Bustillo, Adela Montserrat
AB Allergic respiratory diseases are considered to be among the most important public health concerns, and pollen is the main cause of allergic respiratory diseases worldwide. However, the biological component of air quality is largely underestimated, and there is an important gap in the legislation in this area. The aims of this study were to characterise the occurrence and incidence of pollen exposure in relation to potential pollen sources and to delineate the main areas of aerobiological risk in the Madrid Autonomous Region based on homogeneous patterns of pollen exposure. This study uses the historical aerobiological database of the Madrid Region Palynological Network (central Spain) from ten pollen stations from 1994 to 2022, and the land-use information from the Corine Land Cover. Multiple clustering approaches were followed to group the sampling stations and subsequently all the 1 × 1km pixels for the Madrid Autonomous Region. The clustering dendrogram for land-use distribution was compared to the dendrogram for historical airborne pollen data. The two dendrograms showed a good alignment with a very high correlation (0.95) and very low entanglement (0.15), which indicates a close correspondence between the distribution of the potential pollen sources and the airborne pollen dynamics. Based on this knowledge, the Madrid Autonomous Region was divided into six aerobiological risk areas following a clear anthropogenic gradient in terms of the potential pollen sources that determine pollen exposure in the Madrid Region. Spatial regionalisation is a common practice in environmental risk assessment to improve the application of management plans and optimise the air quality monitoring networks. The risk areas proposed by scientific criteria in the Madrid Autonomous Region can be adjusted to other operational criteria following a framework equivalent to other air quality networks.
PB Elsevier
SN 0269-7491
YR 2024
FD 2024-01-17
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/110268
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/110268
LA eng
NO Jesús Rojo, Patricia Cervigón, Zuzana Ferencova, Ángel Cascón, Javier Galán Díaz, Jorge Romero-Morte, Silvia Sabariego, Margarita Torres, Adela Montserrat Gutiérrez-Bustillo, Assessment of environmental risk areas based on airborne pollen patterns as a response to land use and land cover distribution, Environmental Pollution, Volume 344, 2024, 123385, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2024.123385.
DS Docta Complutense
RD 17 abr 2025