Searching for a trace of Artemisia campestris pollen in the air

The aim of the study was to determinate whether Artemisia campestris was present in the vicinity of 8 pollen monitoring stations in Poland by examining temporal variations in daily average airborne Artemisia pollen data recorded by Hirst type volumetric traps. Three day moving averages of airborne Artemisia pollen were examined by Spearman’s rank correlation test. Results show that Artemisia pollen seasons in Poland generally display similar unimodal patterns (correlation coefficients r > 0.900; P < 0.05). The only exception was the Artemisia pollen concentration noted in the outskirts of Poznań (Morasko), where the bimodal pattern was revealed. Correlations between Artemisia pollen data recorded at Poznań-Morasko and the other Polish sites were the lowest in the investigated dataset; this was particularly noticeable in the second part of pollen season (r ~0.730). We show that the typical bimodal pattern in Artemisia pollen seasons, which is characteristic of the presence of both A. vulgaris (first peak) and A. campestris (second peak), does not occur at the majority of sites in Poland and is restricted to the outskirts of Poznań. In fact, it was noted that the pollen monitoring site in Poznań-Centre, just 8 km from Morasko, only exhibited one peak (attributed to A. vulgaris). This shows that the influence of A. campestris on airborne pollen season curves is limited and can be largely disregarded. In addition, this study supports previous records showing that the spatial distribution of airborne Artemisia pollen within a city (urban-rural gradient) can vary markedly, depending on the species composition.