Ecological and human health risks appraisal of metal(loid)s in agricultural soils: a review

Abstract

Agriculture is one of the major human activities that changed the landforms, water resources and the biogeochemical cycles. Pollution of agricultural soilsby metal(loid)s is a serious and global hazard but worldwide studies related to metal(loid)s pollution in agricultural soils are very limited. To fulfil this gap, metal(loid)s content in agricultural soils from 2001 to 2019 all over the world was reviewed. Multivariate statistical techniques, contamination indices and human health risk assessment were determined for the metal(loid)s. Among the analysed metal(loid)s, the average contents of Zn, Cu, Pb, Cr, Cd, As and Ni exceeded the Canadian, and China soil guidelines limits. The results of contamination factor indicated that Cr, Pb, Cd, As and Zn are the key pollution contaminants. As and Cd had the highest enrichment among the analysed metal(loid)s according to the enrichment factor. The potential and modified ecological risk index showed that Cd is the foremost contaminant responsible for ecological threats. The non-carcinogenic risk for ingestion pathway indicated that As, Pb and Cr are the foremost contaminants responsible for affecting human health, while dermal pathway results showed less risk of metal(loid)s in the agricultural soils. The carcinogenic risk revealed that As, Pb and Cr are the key contaminants that affects human health.

Heavy metal contamination in agricultural soil and ecological risk assessment in the northeast area of Tadla plain, Morocco

“…Contamination of agricultural soils by toxic elements such as heavy metals has become a severe environmental problem (Tang et al 2017;Ali and Khan 2018;Alghamdi et al 2019;Kumar et al 2019) and a potential threat to agricultural production worldwide, because of their non-biodegradable nature, long biological half-lives for elimination (Khan et al 2010;Muhammad et al 2011;Lü et al 2018), their persistence, toxicity and bioaccumulation in the food chain (Zhang 2007;Douay et al 2013). Moreover, this pollution has become more serious with the rapid development of industrialization, urbanization, and increasing reliance on agrochemicals (Krasnići et al 2013;Hu et al 2017;Jordanova et al 2018).…”

Mineralogy and geochemistry of clay fractions in soils developed from different parent rocks in Limpopo Province, South Africa

“… Sharma et al. (2018) and Kumar et al. (2019) advocated for phytoremediation in addition to traditional remediation strategies to remove contaminants from agricultural soils.…”

“…The non-carcinogenic hazard index (HI) and carcinogenic risk index (CRI) were used to assess the health risk associated with the trace elements present in the clay fractions (topsoils, 0–20 cm) since they are preferential enriched in them. The HI and CRI through the different routes were computed using Equations 2–6 ( Luo et al., 2012 ; Gao et al., 2019 ; Kumar et al., 2019 ). The definition of parameters and values used in equations are listed in Table 1 b.…”

Appraisal of pollution of potentially toxic elements in different soils collected around the industrial area

“…Unfortunately, unsustainable development models are degrading agricultural soils at an alarming rate (Kopittke et al, 2019). Soil receives a lot of pollutants from diverse sources related to agriculture and other industries (Naveedullah et al, 2013;Kumar et al, 2019a). The rapid and incessant usage of inorganic pesticides, herbicides etc., has led to degradation of major agricultural edaphic system.…”