Abstract
Urban soils have been changed much by human impacts in terms of structure, composition and use. This review paper gives a general introduction into changes from compaction, mixing, water retention, nutrient inputs, sealing, gardening, and pollution. Because pollutions in particular have caused concerns in the past, metal pollutions and platinum group metal inputs have been treated in more detail. Though it is not possible to cover the entire literature done on this field, it has been tried to give examples from all continents, regarding geochemical background levels. Urban metal soil pollution depends on the age of the settlement, current emissions from traffic and industry, and washout. It seems that in regions of high precipitation, pollutants are swept away to the watershed, leaving the soils less polluted than in Europe. Health hazards, however, are caused by ingestion and inhalation, which are higher in 3rd world countries, and not by concentrations met in urban soils as such; these are not treated within this paper in detail. With respect to pollutants, this paper is focused on metals. Contrary to many reviews of the past, which mix all data into one column, like sampling depth, sieved grain sizes, digestion and determination methods, these have been considered, because this might lead to considerable interpretation changes. Because many datasets are not Gaussian distributed, medians and concentration ranges are given, wherever possible. Urban dust contains about two to three fold the hazardous metal concentrations met in urban soils. Some data about metal mobilities obtained from selective and sequential leaching procedures, are also added. Soil compaction, pollution, sealings and run-offs cause stress situations for green plants growing at roadside locations, which is discussed in the Section 5. Environmental protection measures have led to decrease metal pollutions within the last decade in many places.
Highlights
Urban soils might be defined as soils within the administrative boundaries of municipalities or settlings, respective a territory of settlement and natural production, including rests of soils in young cities.This review should cover all aspects of urban, roadside soils and roadside dusts
Hydraulic properties, carbon storage and organic contaminations may be of equal importance, due to the experiences of the author, it focusses on metal contaminations, the so-called heavy metals and platinum metals, of which much more information is available than about e.g., rare earths and non-metals
Whereas the road dust data refer to samples brushed from the surface, urban soils have been cored 0–2 cm, 0–5 cm, 0–10 cm, 0–20 cm and 0–30 cm, which leads to different proportions of dilution of the road dust and possible pollutants with original soil
Summary
Urban soils might be defined as soils within the administrative boundaries of municipalities or settlings, respective a territory of settlement and natural production, including rests of soils in young cities. This review should cover all aspects of urban, roadside soils and roadside dusts. Hydraulic properties, carbon storage and organic contaminations may be of equal importance, due to the experiences of the author, it focusses on metal contaminations, the so-called heavy metals and platinum metals, of which much more information is available than about e.g., rare earths and non-metals. Because it is impossible to treat all published data within this review, the reader is recommended to look at other compilations (e.g., [2,3,4,5])
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