Heavy metal(loid)s in farmland soils on the Karst Plateau, Southwest China: An integrated analysis of geochemical baselines, source apportionment, and associated health risk

Abstract

The Karst Plateau is characterized by elevated heavy metals (HM), the farmland soils in the Karst Plateau area is especially vulnerable to HM pollution. To cope with soil HM pollution and conduct precaution in Karst Plateau, the key bottleneck is to understand the pollution levels, sources, and priority‐control of HM. Hence, geochemical baselines of HM in farmland soils were established to accurately evaluate the pollution characteristics. Pollution sources were identified with multivariate statistics, geostatistical methods, and receptor models. Priority‐control of HM were distinguished via health assessments with a Monte Carlo simulation. A remarkable accumulation of Pb, Sb, Zn, As, and Cd was observed. Hotspots of As, Cd, Pb, Sb, and Zn clustered in the southwestern region of Hezhang. Pb–Zn related activities, cement product activities, coal mining, and coal combustion were dominant sources. Both noncarcinogenic risk and carcinogenic risk followed the order: children>adult females>adult males. As, Cd, and Pb were found to be priority contaminants in farmland soils in Hezhang.

Integrated Insights into Source Apportionment and Source-Specific Health Risks of Potential Pollutants in Urban Park Soils on the Karst Plateau, SW China

“…Soil samples were prepared for analysis as follows (Han et al 2022 ). Each sample (~ 0.05 g) was weighed into a Teflon-lined stainless-steel bomb and digested with ultrapure 3 mL HNO 3 (15.8 M) and 0.5 mL HF (23 M) at 160 °C for 48 h. After cooling, the solution was evaporated to near-dryness and ultrapure water (4 mL) and HNO 3 (1 mL) were added before further at 160 °C for 16 h.…”

“…Redwood City, CA, USA) software using the following equations, with all the related parameters are given in Table S2–S4 (Han et al 2022 ). To ensure the reliability of results, 10,000 iterations were performed.…”

“…Health risk evaluation is an effective tool for identifying priority-control pollutants in different environment media including soils, groundwater, and foodstuffs (Han et al 2022 ; Liu et al 2022 ; Wang et al 2022 ; Wei et al 2022 ; Xu et al 2020 ). Most evaluations to date have involved deterministic models with fixed parameters (Brtnický et al 2019 ), with uncertainties leading to biased results (Sun et al 2022 ).…”

Diversity and composition of soil bacteria between abandoned and selective-farming farmlands in an antimony mining area

“…Due to many environmental problems related to heavy metal soil pollution, concern about the soil quality of farmlands near metal mining areas is increasing (Tang et al, 2020;Castellano-Hinojosa et al, 2021;Han et al, 2022;Khmelevtsova et al, 2022). Farmlands with heavy metal pollution can show low productivity and poor safety of crops, resulting in the agricultural production activities stopped (Deng et al, 2015).…”

“…However, to meet the production and living needs of local residents, it is unrealistic to abandon large areas of polluted farmland (especially low-pollution farmland). To address this problem, different strategies including metal removal, selective farming and safe farming with agronomic measures have been explored in the past decades (Li, 2019;Jin et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2021;Deng et al, 2021;Han et al, 2022;Khmelevtsova et al, 2022). Among these, selective farming on low-pollution farmland is one of the common farming methods for some countries (including China) with large populations and less cultivated lands (Hou et al, 2018;Han et al, 2022;Khmelevtsova et al, 2022).…”