The aim of air pollution monitoring is a regular and continuous collection of information on air pollution to prevent hazards influencing ecosystem and its components, including humans. Nowadays, the main technology used for this purpose is electronic sensors. As they are designed for specific measurements, a lot of important factors cannot be evaluated – various pollutants diffusion or cumulative effect, exposure, dose, and bioaccumulation. As an alternative solution – bioindication – pollution level determination from its effect on certain indicator species can be used. So far potential usage of bioindication as current air pollution monitoring network’s equivalent solution has not been studied. Therefore, the aim of the research was to assess a variety of bioindication methods for air pollution determination and their applications in air pollution monitoring. During the research, commonly used bioindication methods based on their popularity in scientific literature in 2012 were selected, as well as they were assessed using theoretical analysis method in order to determine their strong and weak points in air pollution monitoring. Research results demonstrate that current bioindication methods are not suitable for monitoring purposes. Therefore, bioindication can be combined with citizen science approach. To incorporate citizen science approach in bioindication based air pollution monitoring, development of special, for this purpose designed bioindication methodology is needed.

The emergence of human–induced edges in forested landscapes has caused major threat for the existence of habitat specialists. Woodland key habitat (WKH) concept has been created in the Baltic and Fennoscandian forests to preserve small forest parcels with a high biodiversity value in the production forests. In this study we investigated the occurrence of epiphytic lichen indicator species in black alder WKHs in Southern Latvia. In total 30 black alder WKHs with age of 84 to 129 years were chosen for analysis including stands adjacent to young, middle–aged and mature stands. Sample plots were placed at three distances from the forest edge. Our results indicate significant differences in number of species per sample plots adjacent to stands of different age. Lichen indicator species were considerably more common in habitats adjacent to mature forest stands and further (40–50 m) from the edge. From four lichen indicator species found in this study, sample plots adjacent to young stands hosted only two species. We argue that the indicator species response to human–induced edges is species specific and some of them are resistant to microclimatic changes near the edges.