Uma síntese dos estudos com fitorremediação nos últimos anos (1991-2014)

Abstract

From the increase of the concern with the environmental problems emerged the need to propose new forms of control and recovery of the environment. Among the various tools to reduce the contaminants in the environment, the bioremediation stands out by be viable and promising. In this context, the phytoremediation that is a technique of bioremediation has been widely used. This technique has the function to accumulate, transform, degrade and/or stabilize a contaminant. Thus, in order to identify key trends and focus of studies on phytoremediation, such as knowledge the plants, pollutants, places and environments more studied, this paper made a scientometric analysis of phytoremediation using the database Thomson ISI in the Web of Science between 1991-2014. There was a strong growth trend of articles related to phytoremediation over the analysis period. In the last four years were identified more than 500 articles a year. India and Spain are not in the forefront on global scientific production, but showed a high number of phytoremediation publications. As observed in other scientometric work also identified a strong temporal decrease in the number of articles with a single author. Groups of four authors produced most of articles. There was a great diversity of plant species in the studied; however, most articles are concentrated in plants very well studied as Brassica sp., Salix sp. and Populus sp. These plants were used in the control of various contaminants. Knowledge of plants in their different aspects such as genetics, evolution and physiology are essential for their use in phytoremediation. Thus, given the great diversity of plants known, probably the most in-depth study of these aspects will involves the discovery of new plants with potential use in phytoremediation. Also identified the need to produce studies involving air pollution, since the same in absolute numbers were scarce.