Abstract
An ambitious citizen science effort in the city of Indianapolis (IN, USA) led to the collection and analysis of a large number of samples at the property scale, facilitating the analysis of differences in soil metal concentrations as a function of property location (i.e., dripline, yard, and street) and location within the city. This effort indicated that dripline soils had substantially higher values of lead and zinc than other soil locations on a given property, and this pattern was heightened in properties nearer the urban core. Soil lead values typically exceeded the levels deemed safe for children’s play areas in the United States (<400 ppm), and almost always exceeded safe gardening guidelines (<200 ppm). As a whole, this study identified locations within properties and cities that exhibited the highest exposure risk to children, and also exhibited the power of citizen science to produce data at a spatial scale (i.e., within a property boundary), which is usually impossible to feasibly collect in a typical research study.
Highlights
Urban soils bear a lingering legacy of sometimes centuries of human occupation and industrialization (e.g., [1,2,3])
We wait until hundreds or even thousands of kids appear on public health records through high blood Pb levels before we can use this to map the urban Pb exposome [17,18,19], which is a harmful and backwards approach to protecting public health (e.g., [1,20])
The results reveal the power of citizen science to take an active role in understanding the urban Pb exposome and to help fill the gap in the currently poor state of urban soil geochemical mapping
Summary
Urban soils bear a lingering legacy of sometimes centuries of human occupation and industrialization (e.g., [1,2,3]). Among the many anthropogenic inputs to surface soils are metals, many of which, such as lead (Pb), have a very strong and permanent impact on human health and urban well-being. The social, health, and economic cost of Pb exposure from urban soils is steep—far greater than the cost of targeted remediation of soil Pb hotspots [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. What is needed is a better understanding of the soil metal dynamics and patterns of distribution and associations in the urban environment, with an eye toward identifying
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