Abstract
Intensive anthropogenic activity may result in uncontrolled release of various pollutants that ultimately accumulate in soils and may adversely affect ecosystems and human health. Hazard screening, prioritisation and subsequent risk assessment are usually performed on a chemical-by-chemical basis and need expensive and time-consuming methods. Therefore, there is a need to look for fast and reliable methods of risk assessment and contamination prediction in soils. One promising technique in this regard is visible and near infrared (VIS-NIR) spectroscopy. The aim of the study was to evaluate potential environmental risk in soils subjected to high level of anthropopressure using VIS-NIR spectroscopy and to calculate several risk indexes for both individual polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and their mixture. Results showed that regarding 16PAH concentration, 78% of soil samples were contaminated. Risk assessment using the most conservative approach based on hazard quotients (HQ) for 10 individual PAHs allowed to conclude that 62% of the study area needs further action. Application of concentration addition or response addition models for 16PAHs mixture gave a more realistic assessment and indicates unacceptable risk in 23% and 55% of soils according to toxic units (TUm) and toxic pressure (TPm) approach. Toxic equivalency quotients (TEQ) were below the safe limit for human health protection in 88% of samples from study region. We present here the first attempt at predicting risk indexes using VIS-NIR spectroscopy. The best results were obtained with binary models. The accuracy of binary model can be ordered as follows: TPm (71.6%) < HI (85.1%) < TUm (87.9%) and TEQ (94.6%). Both chemical indexes and VIS-NIR can be successfully applied for first-tier risk assessment.
Highlights
Anthropogenic activities such as industrialization, urbanization, mining and agriculture intensification can generate serious soil contamination problems worldwide
Rural areas are often located in the proximity of highly urbanised or industrial areas and may be exposed to high, continuous inputs of various pollutants, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which may persist for a long-time in soils and pose a threat to ecosystems and human health
We demonstrated the combination of chemical indexes and visible and near infrared (VIS-NIR) spectroscopy for first-tier screening assessment and identification of areas where site-specific assessment is needed
Summary
Anthropogenic activities such as industrialization, urbanization, mining and agriculture intensification can generate serious soil contamination problems worldwide. Soil pollution has been identified as the third most important threat to soil functions in Europe [1] and raises serious concerns about the risks to human and ecosystem health. The presence of both inorganic and organic pollutants may strongly affect different soil functions. One group of contaminants of special concern are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), semi-volatile, stable, hydrophobic compounds that are ubiquitous in the environment and are good markers of anthropogenic pressure [2,3,4].
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