Objective
Contamination of soil by toxic metals and other pollutants from industrial sources is a serious problem in many European countries including Russia. Organic matter in soil can greatly influence the bio-availability of such substances as well as the extent to which they are at risk of being transported to aquifers and to deeper soil layers and the risk of plant uptake. However, the mechanisms involved and the particular fractions of soil organic matter (SOM) that are important are poorly understood.
The task of this project is to estimate the mobility of nutrients and pollutants of soils and investigate the role of SOM in estimating risks of soil contaminations to the environment.
Investigations will be performed with soils of areas with different degrees of contamination and use, including agricultural, urban areas and meadows. These soils stem from regions near Leipzig in Germany, Moscow in Russia and Chomutov in Czechoslovakia and are described as follows: long-term experiment at Bad Lauchstädt (loess black earth, agricultural use, not or low-level contaminated); soils from a meadow area of the river Mulde near Leipzig (meadow soils, agricultural use or pasture, different contamination levels depending on overflow conditions); soil samples from Chomutov in Czechoslovakia (industrial area in north Bohemia, coal mining and power stations, recultivation areas); soils from Moscow (agricultural areas near steel mill of different contamination levels).
Basis for the investigations is a fractionation of the SOM under different aspects. One aspect is a fractionation regarding the stability of SOM to microbial decomposition. A comparison of two different methods of determination of soil microbial biomass on the one hand, and the fraction of slightly decomposable SOM in hot water extract including the nutrient and pollutant content in it on the other hand, will be performed.
The method of a granulodensimetric fractionation is another aspect of this project. With this method, the bonding of SOM - and in this connection the bonding of nutrients and pollutants too - to soil particles of different size, especially to clay, will be determined. This includes, in all cases, the determination of heavy metals in the granulodensimetric fractions. The determination of organic pollutants in these fractions will be tested.
A correlation will be defined between the risk of soil contamination and the linkage of pollutants and nutrients to soil organic matter including the role of the soil micriobial biomass. This combination should enable risks of soil contamination for the environment to be estimated. The results will be published in the scientific literature.
Call for proposal
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06246 Bad Lauchstädt
Germany