Dr. Ramirez-Andreotta spent a Saturday afternoon this April talking about environmental health justice and community gardening at the UA Biosphere II in Oracle, Arizona.
We are in the news.
A Gardenroots publication, which demonstrated that plant leaves work as a reliable air monitor, was selected as one of the top NIEHS papers of 2021.
Gardenroots demonstrated that leaves can be used as a low-cost, reliable method to assess the level of metals in airborne dust. The method can help assess exposure from former mine sites that emit heavy metals that can be distributed by wind to nearby communities.
Twenty participants from Superior, Arizona, placed a potted peppermint plant and disc sampler in a self-selected area, usually outside of their home. After one month, they submitted two leaves and the disc for analysis of seven different metals — arsenic, lead, cadmium, copper, aluminum, nickel, and zinc.
On both the leaves and discs, levels of all metals decreased as distance from the mine increased. The results suggest that plant leaves can serve as a reliable monitor of metal-laden aerosols and that the low-cost technique is applicable to sites where resources are limited.
Citation: Zeider K, Van Overmeiren N, Rine KP, Sandhaus S, Eduardo Saez A, Sorooshian A, Munoz HC Sr, Ramirez-Andreotta MD. 2021. Foliar surfaces as dust and aerosol pollution monitors: an assessment by a mining site. Sci Total Environ 790:148164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.148164.
Check out the summary prepared by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences: https://factor.niehs.nih.gov/2021/10/papers/dert#a2
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Concerned Citizens & Retired Miners Coalition in Superior, AZ, specifically Roy C. Chavez for their dedication to environmental protection and social justice. Thank you to all the Superior, AZ Gardenroots participants for their time and efforts on the project. Special thank you to Iliana Manjón for their previous efforts and Fig. 3 and Miriam Jones for providing assistance to participants. Lastly, with great sadness, we would like to dedicate this manuscript to Roy Chavez, community champion and Chair/Spokesperson of the Concerned Citizens & Retired Miners Coalition in Superior, AZ who passed away in 2020.
More News
University of Arizona Superfund Research Program (UA SRP) Research Translation Core (RTC) investigator, Dr. Monica Ramirez-Andreotta, has been making waves since returning home to take a faculty position at her alma mater, the University of Arizona, last year. Ramirez-Andreotta is a transdisciplinary environmental health scientist who specializes in the fate and transport of contaminants in plant-soil systems, research translation, and community engagement efforts. Within this last year, she has received a number of city, state, international, and foundation grants to support her burgeoning research program.
Dr. Mónica Ramírez-Andreotta has been a part of the University of Arizona Superfund Research Program (UA SRP) since 2005, first as Research Translation Core Coordinator, and then as a Training Core Fellow earning her PhD in 2012. She then left to train as a post-doc and become Assistant Professor of Health Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston, MA working in the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute there. In 2015 Ramírez-Andreotta returned to the UA as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Soil, Water, and Environmental Science, and she continues to collaborate with UA SRP with seed funding from the Center for Environmentally Sustainable Mining. Following the success of her dissertation project, Gardenroots: The Dewey-Humboldt AZ Garden Project, Ramírez-Andreotta has continued her work investigating the uptake of metals by edible plants.