Preliminary study on contamination patterns and soil carbon in forest soils

Abstract

Nowadays forest ecosystems are receiving much attention in relation to several environmental issues, such as heavy metals (HMs) loads, and overall impact on global carbon cycle. Forest soils can be exposed to anthropogenic contamination of HMs from various sources: e.g. atmospheric deposition from local and distant contamination sources or direct treatment (e.g. application of sewage sludge). This may have an impact on forest soil quality, chemical composition, contamination uptake by forest plants, distribution of contaminants in plants and soil profile and thus contribute to physiological changes in forest ecosystems which play an important role in global biogeochemical cycle. Preliminary analyses of correlation between contamination patterns and soil carbon give indications about possible interactions between anthropogenic load of HMs and soil carbon. The strong correlations between mobile HMs and both TC and OC suggest that investigated forest soils are likely to have higher content of stabilized fraction of soil organic matter which attracts higher amount of metals and is less decomposed by microorganisms.