Spatial Analysis and Indicator Building for Metal Accumulation in Mosses

Mosses are used as passive accumulation monitors for metal accumulation in terrestrial ecosystems. Under leadership of the Federal Agency for Environmental Protection Germany took part in the previous European-wide moss monitoring campaigns 1990, 1995 and 2000. The investigations accomplished thereby cannot be presented completely in this article. The remarks rather concentrate on methodical aspects of the statistical data analysis. In Chapter 2 the design of data collection is summarized. Chapter 3 treats the geostatistical analysis and transformationof point data to areal information. Chapter 4 describes the aggregation of the element-specific metal concentrations in mosses to a spatially and temporally differentiated indicator of metal accumulation by means of descriptive and multivariate statistics. The work presented is only a small part of geostatistics and multivariate statistics which fit for analysis of moss monitoring data. Taking the results presented here as a basis, the following steps would further be of great importance: cluster-analytic evaluation of the results of the Moss Monitoring 1990 and 1995, detailing the cluster results using additional empirical and location describing information (e.g. moss species, ecoregions, site and species specific variability of metal accumulation) as well as optimizing the indicator buildung by testing of multivariate statistical regression models (e.g. Classification and Regression Trees).