Towards European automatic bioaerosol monitoring: Comparison of 9 automatic pollen observational instruments with classic Hirst-type traps.

To benefit allergy patients and the medical practitioners, pollen information should be available in both a reliable and timely manner; the latter is only recently possible due to automatic monitoring. To evaluate the performance of all currently available automatic instruments, an international intercomparison campaign was jointly organised by the EUMETNET AutoPollen Programme and the ADOPT COST Action in Munich, Germany (March-July 2021). The automatic systems (hardware plus identification algorithms) were compared with manual Hirst-type traps. Measurements were aggregated into 3-hourly or daily values to allow comparison across all devices. We report results for total pollen as well as for Betula, Fraxinus, Poaceae, and Quercus, for all instruments that provided these data. The results for daily averages compared better with Hirst observations than the 3-hourly values. For total pollen, there was a considerable spread among systems, with some reaching R

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Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Jeroen Buters, Jose M. Maya Manzano, Carsten B. Schmidt-Weber and Marina Triviño report financial support, administrative support, equipment, drugs, or supplies, and travel were provided by Bayerisches Landesamt für Gesundheit und Lebensmittelsicherheit (LGL) and EUMETNET. Carsten Skjoth reports financial support, administrative support, article publishing charges, equipment, drugs, or supplies, and travel were provided by COST Action CA18226 ADOPT – New approaches in detection of pathogens and aeroallergens. Bernard Clot and Fiona Tummon report financial support, administrative support, article publishing charges, equipment, drugs, or supplies, and travel were provided by European Meteorological Society and the EUMETNET AutoPollen Programme. Branko Sikoparija and Predrag Matavulj report financial support, administrative support, article publishing charges, equipment, drugs, or supplies, and travel were provided by BREATHE project from the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia PROMIS program, under grant agreement no. 6039613 and by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia (grant agreement number 451–03-68/2022–14/200358). Evgeny Kadantsev and Julia Palamarchuk report financial support, administrative support, article publishing charges, equipment, drugs, or supplies, and travel were provided by Academy of Finland PS4A (grant 318,194). Mikhail Sofiev reports financial support, administrative support, article publishing charges, equipment, drugs, or supplies, and travel were provided by Academy of Finland project ALL-Impress (grant 329,215). Mikhail Sofiev reports financial support, administrative support, article publishing charges, equipment, drugs, or supplies, and travel were provided by European Social Fund (project no. 09.3.3-LMT-K-712-01-0066) and Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT). Nathan Allan, Landon Bunderson, Richard W. Lucas (Pollen science TM), Jorg Haus, Stefan Schaefer, Martin Schnitzler and Tom Stemmler (Helmut Hund Wetzlar), Reto Abt, Elias Graf, Erny Niederberger and Yanick Zeder (Swisens AG) report a relationship with Pollen science TM, Helmut Hund Wetzlar and Swisens AG respectively, that includes: board membership, employment, and travel reimbursement. The investigations were carried out in compliance with good scientific practices and the support provided by these companies in terms of instrumentation had no effect on the results presented.