Geostatistical Assessment of the Impact of World War I on the Spatial Occurrence of Soil Heavy Metals

Abstract

Previous research showed a regional Cu enrichment of 6 mg kg -1 in the top soil of the Ypres war zone (Belgium), caused by corrosion of WWI shell fragments. Further research was required since in addition to Cu, also As, Pb, and Zn were used during the manufacturing of ammunition. Therefore, an additional data collection was conducted in which the initial Cu data set was tripled to 731 data points and extended to eight heavy metals (As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, Ni, Pb, and Zn) which permitted (1) to evaluate the environmental impact of the heavy metals at a regional scale and (2) to assess their regional spatial occurrence by performing an optimized geostatistical modeling. The results showed no pollution at a regional scale, but sometimes locally concentrations exceeded the soil sanitation threshold, especially for Cu, Pb, and Zn. The spatial patterns of Ni and Cr were related to variations in soil texture whereas the occurrences of Cu and Pb were clearly linked to WWI activities. This difference in spatial behavior was confirmed by an analysis of coregionalization.

A method of identifying priority spatial patterns for the management of potential ecological risks posed by heavy metals

“…The nearer the SMPE value to 0, the more accurate the interpolation results. The SMPE value in this study is 0.03, indicating sufficient prediction accuracy for the purpose of identifying priority patterns [22,24,25,37,58,59,67].…”

“…A lot of research has been conducted in the assessment of the potential ecological risks associated with HM [20,22,24,25,37,67]. Different indices and methods have been proposed to quantitatively assess the cumulative ecological risks of HM, such as the PERI index [22,39], geoaccumulation index [40][41][42], and excess after regression analysis [43].…”

Soil Contamination in Areas Impacted by Military Activities: A Critical Review

“…The soil concentrations of contaminants in military zones and war-impacted areas in literature have been typically compared to various types of defined values: (1) background soil concentrations [13,[15][16][17][18][19][20], (2) agricultural soil concentrations [9,17,21,22], (3) generic industrial, urban, and/or recreational soil concentrations [9,13,16,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29], and (4) military range soil concentrations. Some reference values, as well as limits for PTE and CM concentrations in soils, are summarized in Tables 1 and 2, respectively.…”

Basic Steps in Geostatistics: The Variogram and Kriging

“…Chromium, in contrast, seems to derive locally from the rocks. An unusual application of geostatistics to pollution is that of Meerschman et al (2011). They sampled the soil around Ypres, Belgium, where a battle was fought during the First World War.…”