I don’t know if people do this in real life (or I would have chosen a different thread), but one obstacle why they would not is lack of infrastructure. Once you get a truckload of toxic waste, what to do with it?.. Also, I hope to have some numbers for one species (actually, for a fraction of its ecoforms) in a limited range of pollutants in a specific geographic area, under specific land use conditions, collaborating with chemists who will hopefully find the problem interesting enough, AND I live in Ukraine. I won’t have time for it until after defending my thesis. Give me a Latin name, and I will try to come with a prediction, however off key; but generalizing across orders of flowering plants is simply wrong.
(ETA: a nitpick. A lawn is not a HM sink. The soil is far too often disturbed, and new layers are not yearly deposited there. It won’t hold the pollutants reliably. Maybe, under some conditions, it is better not to extract them, I will have to think upon it. And the concept of a grass that nobody ever eats blew my mind, it did. Save yourself, man! (Woman, child, alien, AI.) Run! Sell your house to a sci-fi writer and don’t look back!)
(Still haven’t got to read stuff on that, maybe I’ll be more lucky next week. After five minutes by the clock thinking about the idea and its alternatives, have two results: 1) I think veeery slowly, 2) maybe it’s possible to make a thin porous cable stuffed with enzyme analogue to download HM directly from the soil, collect them on electrodes once they are in, and extract massively in a special facility.)
I don’t know if people do this in real life (or I would have chosen a different thread), but one obstacle why they would not is lack of infrastructure. Once you get a truckload of toxic waste, what to do with it?.. Also, I hope to have some numbers for one species (actually, for a fraction of its ecoforms) in a limited range of pollutants in a specific geographic area, under specific land use conditions, collaborating with chemists who will hopefully find the problem interesting enough, AND I live in Ukraine. I won’t have time for it until after defending my thesis. Give me a Latin name, and I will try to come with a prediction, however off key; but generalizing across orders of flowering plants is simply wrong. (ETA: a nitpick. A lawn is not a HM sink. The soil is far too often disturbed, and new layers are not yearly deposited there. It won’t hold the pollutants reliably. Maybe, under some conditions, it is better not to extract them, I will have to think upon it. And the concept of a grass that nobody ever eats blew my mind, it did. Save yourself, man! (Woman, child, alien, AI.) Run! Sell your house to a sci-fi writer and don’t look back!)
I’ll ask a simpler question. What is the best (in terms of heavy-metal concentration as % of biomass) that a flowering plant can do?
(Still haven’t got to read stuff on that, maybe I’ll be more lucky next week. After five minutes by the clock thinking about the idea and its alternatives, have two results: 1) I think veeery slowly, 2) maybe it’s possible to make a thin porous cable stuffed with enzyme analogue to download HM directly from the soil, collect them on electrodes once they are in, and extract massively in a special facility.)
To extract heavy metals from the soil you need a LOT of contact surface. Roots excel at this, cables, not so much.
I know. Still might be more feasible.