Five bioassays (inhibition of lettuce germination and growth, earthworm mortality, inhibition of springtail population growth, avoidance by springtails) were compared, using four coke factory soils contaminated by PAHs and trace elements, before and after biotreatment. For each bioassay, several endpoints were combined in an 'ecoscore', a measure of test sensitivity. Ecoscores pooled over all t...

In the one hundred years since the birthday of Academician W. J. Vernadsky, in whose honour this Geochemical Conference is being held, the population of our world has grown from about 1,250 million to not far short of 3,150 million, an addition of some 1,900 million persons. Thus, there are approximately two and one half times as many people in the world today as there were when Academician Ver...

Contamination of agricultural soils with trace elements (TEs) through municipal and industrial wastes, atmospheric deposition and fertilisers is a matter of great global concern. Since TE accumulation in edible plant parts depends on soil characteristics, plant genotype and agricultural practices, those soil- and plant-specific options that restrict the entry of harmful TEs into the food chain ...

Understanding the effects of environmental factors on microbial communities is critical for microbial ecology, but it remains challenging. In this study, we examined the diversity (alpha diversity) and community compositions (beta diversity) of prokaryotes and fungi in hypersaline sediments and salinized soils from northern China. Environmental variables were highly correlated, but they differe...

One of the main current concerns regarding soil quality is the presence of trace metals that constitutes a risk of toxicity for plants and animals [1, 5, 7, 11]. Trace metals in soils can have either a lithogenic origin when they inherit from the lithosphere or an anthropogenic origin when they result from man’s activities (mining, metallurgy of non-ferrous metals, combustion of fossil energy s...

Automobile catalytic converters are dispersing platinum-group elements (PGEs) Rh, Pt, and Pd into the environment (1-3). This paper represents the first detailed study to assess the PGE content of soils and grasses from U.S. roadsides. These soils were analyzed using cation exchange pretreatment and ultrasonic nebulizer-ICP-MS (4). Highway and several urban sites showed Pt abundances of 64-73 n...

After a catastrophic 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck the east coast of Japan in April 2011, a chain of events was set in motion leading to the release of several volatile radionuclides of Cs and I into the atmosphere due to explosions in three of the six reactor cores at the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP). This study shows the enrichment of stable Cs relative to other alkali meta...

Introduction Conclusions References

To assess the geochemical features of sedimentary material Zarafshon river, (Western Tajikistan) catchment basin, mass fractions 38 major and trace elements were determined by Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) in 2 × 116 paired samples sediments soils collected along River its main tributaries from sources to Tajik—Uzbek border. At each collecting location, distance between soils’...