Soils are essential components of the environment, the basis of terrestrial ecosystems, and a crossroads for biochemical cycles at the biosphere-litosphere interface. Therefore, soil quality must be preserved. The concentration and spatial distribution of potentially toxic elements (PTE) depend on parent material, climate, topography, soil type, and soil use. The anthropogenic mismanagement of industrial and mining resources or the abusive use of agrochemicals could alter the normal levels of PTE in soils, causing contamination, environmental troubles and health concerns. Sustainable development is dependent upon a pedogeochemical mapping conducted at widely varying scales. The resulting maps are useful for land-use and environmental regulatory policies.
This Session will consider the current and future developments in pedogeochemical mapping of PTE such as kriging and other digital soil mapping techniques, including GIS and GPS systems, geostatistics, interpolation, fractals and multifractal modelling, Fuzzy logic models,satellite imagenery incorporated into multivariate geostatistical,etc.
All contributions (oral and poster) on the visualization of PTE data of pedogeochemical maps (i.e: black-and-white point source maps, EDA black-and-white maps, growing-dot-maps, smoothed contour, raster, colour surface maps, smoothed moving median colour maps, etc.) are welcome.