The cork as environmental probe of heavy metals – a socio- environmental service done by 'montados' with cork oaks and cork oak stands (Quercus suber L.)

Abstract

The long term life of cork oak and the capacity that amadia cork has to build annual layers (highly separable) allowed to create the hypothesis of correlation between the chemical marks made in each growing layer and the environmental characteristics of the place where the cork oak grows. This would allow to build space and time distribution series every nine years, about the characteristic in study. This is somewhat alike some dendrometric procedures, but these ones are much more aggressive. The objective of this work was to study lead (II) in cork by voltammetry, because this method is well recognized as having competitive vantages over other known methods already used. The methodology adopted was: bark extraction, acid-hot digestion in closed recipient and voltammetric analytical signal search. The main conclusion is the possible association of this technique as another socioenvironmental service that montado can provide, in order to evaluate the quality of mediterranean basin continental areas with cork oak tree, regarding lead contamination.