Prediction of Distribution of Soil Cd Concentrations in Guangdong Province, China

Abstract

Heavy metals are one of the principal soil pollution sources. Contaminated soils affect the quality of agricultural products, and then threaten human health. Prediction of the contaminants distribution in the soil is the foundation of pollution evaluation and risk control. A total of 1000 soil profiles were collected to investigate the spatial variation of soil cadmium (Cd) concentration in Guangdong province. These datasets were divided into two groups, about 900 samples for model training and the other 100 for model validation. Six frequently used GIS spatial interpolation methods including Spline, Natural Neighbor, Ordinary Kriging, Inverse Distance Weighted, Local Polynomial Interpolation and Radial Basis Function, and Cubist which is a type of rule-based model were compared to determine their suitability parameters for estimating soil Cd concentration. Nine different resolutions including 2000, 1500, 1000, 800, 500, 300, 200, 150, and 90 m were selected to calculate, evaluate and compare their accuracy. The results showed that, 1 Quantitative assessment of the continuous surfaces showed that there was a large difference in the accuracy of the seven methods. Cubist was superior to GIS-based spatial interpolation methods at all resolutions. Cubist was the best tool for mapping the spatial distribution of Cd in soils with thirty-seven specific predictors relevant to the source and behavior of Cd (parent material, land use, soil type, soil properties, population density, gross domestic product per capita, and the lengths and classes of the roads surrounding the sampling sites, climatic factors, etc.) at 300 m×300 m resolution. The second was Spline, its accuracy was optimal at the 1500 m×1500 m resolution. 2 Results of Cubist suggested that the soil Cd spatial distribution was primarily dependent on the properties of soil regional parent materials. And soil samples with higher Cd concentration mainly located in Carboniferous and Quaternary areas. 3 Spatially, Cd concentrations were higher in the Pearl River Delta region and north of Guangdong Province. Many hotspots existed throughout the Pearl River Delta region due to transportation and pollution of the river. The major anthropogenic inputs of heavy metals to soils and the environment were metalliferous mining and smelting in the north of Guangdong Province. The soil Cd geometric mean concentration of 0.147 mg·kg-1 was lower than that of China, however it varied from zero to 6.056 mg·kg-1. The areas with soil Cd concentrations greater than 1.0 and 3.0 mg·kg-1 were 160 km2 and 2140 km2 respectively, accounting for 0.09% and 1.18% of the total area of Guangdong Province.