Understanding urban soil geochemistry is a challenging task because of the complicated layering of the urban landscape and the profound impact of large cities on the chemical dispersion of harmful trace elements. A systematic geochemical soil survey was performed across Greater Athens and Piraeus, Greece. Surface soil samples (0-10cm) were collected from 238 sampling sites on a regular 1×1km gr...

Raising chickens for eggs in urban areas is becoming increasingly common. Urban chickens may be exposed to lead, a common urban soil contaminant. We measured lead concentrations in chicken eggs from New York City (NYC) community gardens and collected information on factors that might affect those concentrations. Lead was detected between 10 and 167 μg/kg in 48 % of NYC eggs. Measures of lead in...

Precipitation is a well known phenomenon. If the pH of it is less than 5.6 precipitations are considered as acidic else it is alkaline. Basically soil is alkaline in nature. Recently man’s activities have increased emissions of oxides of nitrogen and sulphur results in increase in acidity of atmosphere. When these gases react with different elements in the atmosphere the acids are re-introduced...

Recognizing the growing importance of both structure (maintenance of biodiversity) and function (fostering natural cycles) of urban ecologies, we examine coarse scale (herbaceous, shrub and forest) beta guild trajectory in an urban brownfield. The distribution of the pioneer forest assemblage dominated by Betula populifolia Marsh. and Populus spp. could be correlated positively with total soil ...

The objective of the presented work was to conduct an ex-post analysis of land use change in Wroclaw city, Poland, as a response to the soil protection regulations. The assessment that was a part of Urban Soil Management Strategy (URBAN-SMS) project involved development of land use change maps based on the satellite image data, analysis of land use change trends within 15 years period and subse...

Urban agriculture has been recently highlighted with the increased importance for recreation in modern society; however, soil quality and public health may not be guaranteed because of continuous exposure to various pollutants. The objective of this study was to evaluate the soil quality of urban agriculture by soil microbial assessments. Two independent variables, organic and inorganic fertili...

Arsenic contamination is of great environmental concern due to its toxic effects as a carcinogen. Knowledge of arsenic background concentrations is important for land application of wastes and for making remediation decisions. The soil clean-up target level for arsenic in Florida (0.8 and 3.7 mg kg for residential and commercial areas, y1 respectively) lies within the range of both background a...

heavy metals in high concentrations in soils are potential health risk for humans, animals, and plants. soil samples were collected in five replicates from 20 points with four land use including: roads, refineries, residential area (sadra town), and farmland. heavy metals were determined using flame atomic absorption (analyticjena), while dtpa was chosen as trace elements extractor. in this stu...

Riparian wetlands have been shown to be effective "sinks" for nitrate N (NO3-), minimizing the downstream export of N to streams and coastal water bodies. However, the vast majority of riparian denitrification research has been in agricultural and forested watersheds, with relatively little work on riparian wetland function in urban watersheds. We investigated the variation and magnitude of den...

Wetlands in older urban areas have often been integrated into stormwater management systems and exhibit severe degradation from receiving decades of untreated and uncontrolled urban runoff. Vegetative diversity is often poor and dominated by a few hardy species such as cattail (Typha latifolia) or reed canary grass (Phalaris arundinacea). These wetlands may also be affected by legacy impacts fr...