The soil safety situation in Hungary, especially around the military sites.

Effective management of soil damage is essential for national defence. In such a situation, chemical analytical methods are used to assess the contamination, which, although accurate, are time-consuming, costly and do not provide sufficient information on the state of the pedosphere on their own. Rapid decision making is of paramount importance, especially in disaster situations, and a rapid procedure for in situ assessment of the damage site, complemented by interpretation of soil health data, would be needed. The combined use of near-surface remote sensing methods, non-destructive analytical techniques and ecotoxicology could provide a new, optimised approach to soil safety. For the measurements in my research, I use in situ applicable non-destructive instruments (so-called proximal soil sensing) in the designated military sample area. The detection of soil radiation was performed by means of airborne remote sensing using an unmanned aerial vehicle (uav) mounted radiation measuring device. The potentially toxic element content was measured using a hand-held X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (PXRF). Ecotoxicological tests, soil column and microcosm experiments were set up to investigate soil ecosystem sensitivity. My objectives are to (i) implement improvements to facilitate effective operations of disaster management agencies (ii) streamline procedures for individual risk reduction and (iii) place the importance of pedosphere ecosystem sensitivity testing in a disaster management context during the execution of operations.

The research was funded by the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund of the National Defence Subprogramme of the Cooperative Doctoral Programme of the Ministry of Innovation and Technology.