With increasing agricultural and industrial use of rare earth elements (REEs), input of REEs into the pedosphere has risen in parallel. Since total REE budgets for soils in Germany are mainly unknown, this pilot study investigates the concentrations of REEs in three loess soil profiles under agricultural land use in the Wetterau region, Germany. There were no significant REE applications in the past, so the presented data can be considered as background concentrations of REEs in soils. In addition to the total REE contents (aqua regia digestion), potentially plant‐available (EDTA) and at actual conditions available, mobile (NH4NO3) REEs have been determined for each horizon. Interactions between REE availability and properties of soils are explained after assessing several chemical and physical properties. The results reveal a wide range of total REE contents, ranging from 222 to 423 mg kg–1. With 10.1% of total REE amounts, the potentially plant‐available proportions of REEs are generally low. In contrast, yttrium, which showed high available proportion of 24.8%, was found to be comparable with Cd. Cerium is the most abundant REE in aqua regia digests, whereas only small amounts in the potentially plant‐available fraction were found. Thus negative cerium anomalies could be concluded concerning its potential availability. Generally, bioavailability of REE had significant correlations between clay contents and Fe and Mn oxides for the majority of REEs. Due to moderately high pH (CaCl2) in soils (average 6.6) the mobile fraction for most of the elements was not detectible.

Intensive agriculture has had multiple negative effects on the environment across large areas of Europe, including a decrease in the degree to which these landscapes serve multiple functions. A quantitative evaluation of the deficits in landscape multifunctionality is difficult, however, for a given landscape as long as "multifunctional reference landscapes" are lacking. We present an interdisciplinary normative scenario approach to overcome this obstacle. Given the example of the lower Wetter-catchment in the Wetterau region (Hesse, Germany), we compare the existing landscape with an expert-generated multifunctional landscape scenario that may also serve as an alternative future. This approach may inspire policy makers and land users by providing a methodology for the design of alternative multifunctional futures in five steps: (1) documentation of today's landscape structure and land use at the scale of uniformly managed land units; (2) detection of functional deficits of today's landscape considering environmental (soil contamination, groundwater production, water quality, biodiversity), economic (land rent), and societal (landscape perception by its population) attributes; (3) compilation of a catalogue of alternative land uses (including linear landscape elements) suitable to minimize the detected functional deficits; (4) rule-based modification of today's land-use pattern into a normative scenario; and (5) comparison of today's landscape and the normative scenario by applying the model network ITE²M. Results highlight a strongly unbalanced allocation of private and public goods in today's landscape with severe deficits in environmental and societal landscape features, but a significantly higher land rent. The designed multifunctional scenario, instead, may be preferred by the local population, and their willingness to pay for multifunctionality could potentially compensate calculated opportunity costs. Hence, the generated landscape scenario may be regarded as an alternative, multifunctional future.

Pedotransfer functions based on general purpose Freundlich isotherms (GPF) were derived for Cd using different combinations of input variables or development conditions. The models match the criterion of flexibility as they were derived from data of 497 soil samples, which had strongly varying soil characteristics. The prediction efficiency of the approaches was investigated by comparison of measured and simulated sorption data for 124 independent soil samples. The parameterisation of the GPF shows that models derived from data of batch sorption experiments by multiple linear regression achieve best goodness-of-fit and statistical consistency. The use of extraction data or nonlinear regression analysis results in greater deviations from the statistical optima. The best overall performance considering parameterisation and validation was observed for the models including (a) the variables 'proton activity', 'clay content', 'soil organic carbon', 'sum of dithionite-extractable Feand Mn-oxides' or (b) the variables 'proton activity', 'potential cation exchange capacity', 'sum of dithionite-extractable Fe-and Mn-oxides'.

No abstract