Base Maps for the Estimation of Diffuse Soil Pollution in Urban Areas

Abstract

Urban soils are highly heterogeneous (Blume 1993; Gilbert 1994) and polluted by several anthropogenic sources of harmful substances. The urban pollution sources are of different kinds: Point sources such as petrol stations or line sources like streets that can contaminate intensively the soil directly and to an restricted extent. Diffuse urban soil pollution is caused, e. g., by household heating, industrial and traffic exhaust, scattered disposed waste and construction materials. The affected area of this kind of pollution can not be delimited by exact borders, especially not if the main pathway of pollution is the atmospheric way. In addition to that, urban diffuse soil pollution is natural background values. This study therefore deals with the challenge to differentiate between natural background, diffuse urban pollution and local contamination. Geostatistical methods are used to model spatial dependencies of element concentrations in urban soils and to detect locally contaminated sites.