“…In addition, data processed in this way can develop a mapping quality that explains the relationship among the original variables more clearly. The aims and principles of DFA are described in detail elsewhere (e.g., [18,20,61]) and have been explained repeatedly by the present authors in various geochemical and environmental studies [23,26,28,34,49,50,52,53,65]. It suffices to say in this paper that DFA is a multivariate method that is particularly effective in pursuing the major sources of between-group differences which, in this study, derive their origin from the accumulation of heavy metals and possibly harmful elements (PHE) in karst soils.…”