Human health risk assessment in regions surrounding historical mining activities: the effect of change of support

Abstract

This paper presents a probabilistic exposure model and its adaptation for use with spatially explicit information: soil contaminant concentrations and pH levels, predicted by geostatistical simulation; and population data mapped according to place of residence. Sequential indicator simulation (SIS) is used to provide 1000 plausible maps of soil contaminant concentrations, and results are fed into the exposure model to produce risk maps. Distributions of exposure values are closely related to uncertainty in the soil contaminant values. Using a different support for the estimations has a large effect on the results when comparing exposure values to regulatory cut-offs. Mapping the number of overexposed people allows effective targeting of clean up to reduce efficiently the number of overexposed individuals. Two areas of historical mining activity, a case study from the Southern Urals region of Russia for metal mining and another study from the Tula coal mining region of Russia, are used to demonstrate the importance of the support in the human health risk evaluation.