Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in air, foliage, and litter in a subtropical forest: Spatioseasonal variations, partitioning, and litter-PAH degradation.

Forest canopies play a vital role in scavenging airborne semi-volatile organic compounds. The present study measured polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the understory air (at two heights), foliage, and litterfall in a subtropical rainforest (the Dinghushan mountain) in southern China. ∑PAH concentrations in the air ranged from 2.75 to 44.0 ng/m (mean = 8.91 ng/m), showing a spatial variation depending on the forest canopy coverage. Vertical distributions of the understory air concentrations also indicated PAH inputs from the above-canopy air. The concentrations of PAHs in fresh litter (with a mean of 261 ± 163 ng/g dry weight (dw)) were slightly lower than those in the foliage (362 ± 291 ng/g dw). Unlike the stable air PAH concentrations for most of the time of the year, the temporal variations of foliage and litter concentrations were remarkable but generally similar. Higher or comparable leaf/litter-air partition coefficients (K) in fresh litter compared with living K in leaves suggest that the forest litter layer is an efficient storage media for PAHs. Degradation of three-ring PAHs in litter under the field conditions follows first-order kinetics (R = 0.81), while the degradation is moderate for four-ring PAHs and insignificant for five- and six-ring PAHs. The yearly net cumulative deposition of PAHs through forest litterfall in the whole Dinghushan forest area over the sampling year was about 1.1 kg, 46% of the initial deposition (2.4 kg). This spatial variations study provides the results of in-field degradation of litter PAHs and makes a quantitative assessment of the litter deposition of PAHs, deducing their residence dynamics in the litter layer in a subtropical rainforest.