Current and future developments in plant biomonitoring

Whether in the air or in the aquatic environment, to date the main functions of plant biomonitoring have been to :

• detection of pollutants present in the environment ;

• estimating different pollution levels;

• delimitation (mapping) of contaminated areas.

Such biomonitoring work is generally carried out using identical plants scattered around the sites to be studied. It is interesting to note that, in this work, plants are always used as state indicators, even when the study of their physiological disturbances to estimate pollutant levels would have enabled them to be used in parallel as exposure indicators. This may be due...