Characteristics of Soil Heavy Metal Pollution and Health Risk Assessment in Urban Parks at a Megacity of Central China

Abstract

In this study, we compared the concentrations of the heavy metals Cd, Cr, Cu, Zn, Ni, and Pb in the surface soils of urban parks in Wuhan, Hubei Province, with those in the surface soils of urban parks worldwide. The soil contamination data were assessed using enrichment factors and spatial analysis of heavy metals using inverse distance weighting and quantitative analysis of heavy metal sources with a positive definite matrix factor (PMF) receptor model. Further, a probabilistic health risk assessment of children and adults using Monte Carlo simulation was performed. The average Cd, Cr, Cu, Zn, Ni, and Pb concentrations in the surface soils of urban parks were 2.52, 58.74, 31.39, 186.28, 27.00, and 34.89 mg·kg−1, respectively, which exceeded the average soil background values in Hubei. From the inverse distance spatial interpolation map, heavy metal contamination was primarily observed to be present to the southwest of the main urban area. The PMF model resolved four sources: mixed traffic and industrial emission, natural, agricultural, and traffic sources, with relative contributions of 23.9%, 19.3%, 23.4%, and 33.4%, respectively. The Monte Carlo health risk evaluation model demonstrated negligible noncancer risks for both adult and child populations, whereas the health effects of Cd and Cr on children were a concern for cancer risks.

Pollution assessment and source apportionment of trace elements in Brazilian urban topsoils

“…This technique involves a multivariate data analysis integrated within Factor Analysis. Such a model is employed for the identification and categorization of pollution sources and has proven to be a valuable tool for estimating pollutant sources in urban soils (Fei et al, 2020;Guan et al, 2018;Huang et al, 2022;Jiang et al, 2021;Li et al, 2023) In essence, within the PMF model, the data matrix of the sample undergoes decomposition into two matrices: factor contributions (𝑔) and factor profiles (𝑓) (EPA, 2014). Through least squares fitting methods, multidimensional variables are simplified into a set number of factors (Hopke, 2000;Paatero and Tapper, 1994).…”

Ecological Risk Assessment and Source Identification of Heavy Metals in Soils from Shiyang River Watershed in Northwest China

“…The enrichment factor (EF) [40][41][42], geological accumulation index (I geo ) [43,44], potential ecological risk index (RI) [45][46][47] and risk assessment index (RAC) [48] were used to assess the ecological risk and source analysis of soil heavy metals. The formulas for these parameters can be found in reference [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8].…”