Global Mercury Assessment Sensing Strategies

Dear Colleagues,

Mercury is a persistent pollutant of global concern due to its toxicity and its capacity to cycle within and between different environmental compartments which represents a risk for human health and ecosystems. Mercury compounds are released to the atmosphere from geogenic and natural-driven processes and anthropogenic sources. Depending on its chemical form, be elemental or oxidised, mercury released to the atmosphere can be subject to long-range transport and transferred to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems by wet scavenging and dry deposition mechanisms. In order to assess the impact on human health and ecosystems with changing emission regimes and climate there is a need to have a representative spatial coverage of monitoring data in both hemispheres, validated regional and global scale models to forecast future changes, and a spatial data infrastructures and tools for downstream data analytics. There is a vast and growing scientific literature on the distribution of mercury in and between environmental compartments. The atmosphere is the primary long-range transport media of Hg emissions, whereas soil and water may play a significant role in the redistribution of Hg in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems including living organisms. Several international programmes are aimed to quantify source-receptor relationships, long-range transport and deposition patterns and identify “hot-spots”. With reference to monitoring, there is a need to advance our technological capability in order to expand the spatial coverage already existing regional and global monitoring networks and reduce the associated management costs, and provide comparable global monitoring data for policy evaluations and research purposes.

In order to support the implementation of the Minamata Convention there is a strong need to develop cost-effective devices and technological systems able to support the ongoing efforts of governments and international organizations and programmes aiming to improve the global coverage of monitoring data by filling large geographical gaps (i.e., Africa, Latin America, Russia, Asia). The overarching goal is to make available comparable global measurements data in order to assess the effectiveness of measures aiming to reducing anthropogenic emissions of mercury and its associated risk for human health and ecosystems.  Considering the low concentrations of mercury in different environmental matrixes, sampling and analytical methods have to be sensitive enough to cope with the requirements of traceability, accuracy, reproducibility and robustness. In recent years significant progress have been made in developing new passive samplers for air, water and soil matrixes, biosensors, as well as active mercury sensors. Thanks to advances in micro- and nano-structured designed materials new devices have been developed, both passive and active sensing devices, opening a new frontier in technological development in mercury monitoring.

This Special Issue of Sensors aims to publish state-of-the-art scientific results related to advances in monitoring and analytical methods and technologies designed to quantify and characterize mercury contaminations at hot spots, urban and industrial sites as well as at background locations. It is going also to comprise the main results achieved in the two European projects named MercOx (http://www.mercox.si/) and iGOSP (ERA-PLANET) (http://www.igosp.eu/).

Interested scientists are kindly invited to submit papers for one or more of the following topics:

(i) Optical colorimetric, electrochemical, chemical and bio-sensors;

(ii) Stand-alone sensor systems or part of an array of sensors;

(iii) Passive sampling devices for air, water and soil matrixes;  

(iv) Multi-functional active air sampling sensors;

(v) New nano-structured materials, eventually functionalized to monitor a targeted mercury species in air, water and soil matrixes;

(vi) Innovative analytical techniques to characterize mercury compounds in abiotic and biotic samples;

(vii) Tools for big field sensor data analytics.

Dr. Antonella Macagnano
Prof. Nicola Pirrone
Prof. Milena Horvat
Guest Editors

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