title: Defining and modeling the soil geochemical background of heavy metals from the Hengshi River watershed (southern China): integrating EDA, stochastic simulation and magnetic parameters.
abstract: It is crucial to separate the soil geochemical background concentrations from anthropogenic anomalies and to provide a realistic environmental geochemical map honoring the fluctuations in original data. This study was carried out in the Hengshi River watershed, north of Guangdong, China and the method proposed combined exploratory data analysis (EDA), sequential indicator co-simulation (SIcS) and the ratio of isothermal remnant magnetization (S(100)=-IRM(-100 mT)/SIRM). The results showed that this is robust procedure for defining and mapping soil geochemical background concentrations in mineralized regions. The rock magnetic parameter helps to improve the mapping process by distinguishing anthropogenic influences. In this study, the geochemical backgrounds for four potentially toxic heavy metals (copper 200mg/kg; zinc 23 0mg/kg; lead 190 mg/kg and cadmium 1.85 mg/kg) Cu, Zn and Cd exceeded the soil Grade II limits (for pH<6.5) from the Chinese Environmental Quality Standard for Soils (GB 15618-1995) (EQSS) which are 100, 200, 250 and 0.3mg/kg for Cu, Zn, Pb and Cd, respectively. In particular, the geochemical background level for Cd exceeds standard six times. Results suggest that local public health is at high-risk along the riparian region of the Hengshi River, although the watershed ecosystem has not been severely disturbed.
authors.affiliation: School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510275, PR China. xuzhou228@yahoo.cn
authors.forename: Xu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Beicheng
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Xia
mesh_terms: D002681:China; D008280:Magnetics; D019216:Metals, Heavy / Q000737:chemistry*; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D013269:Stochastic Processes; D035501:Uncertainty
chemical_list: D019216:Metals, Heavy