Floristic Summary of North American Plant Species in the Air Pollution Literature

Abstract

It is a well established fact that air pollutants affect vegetation in many different ways. This knowledge is based on a surprisingly large body of literature. For a relatively small field of specialization, there are literally thousands of papers on the subject. Research on the subject began in the field of plant pathology, and later became a topic of interest for persons in the fields of agriculture, plant physiology, plant ecology, biochemistry and plant anatomy. Hundreds to thousands of species have been studied, including lichens, fungi, mosses, angiosperms and gymnosperms. The field has also become increasingly difficult to maintain current awareness in due to the explosion of journals being published. Articles on this subject appear in hundreds of journals every year. However, the availability of inexpensive database computer software in recent years has brought significant relief to this problem. Storing bibliographic and keyword records of the literature articles has become much easier. This paper describes one project to computerize the literature of this field.