engleski

Monitoring and assessment of urban soils' quality: Specific case of the City of Zagreb

Quantifying urban soil properties is essential for assessing urban ecosystem services and detecting pollution. Characterizing spatial heterogeneity of urban soils properties and function, which may be changed with land use or urbanization, is crucial for understanding urban ecosystem functions. Therefore, the project Monitoring of urban soils' quality of the City of Zagreb was designed to enable collection and analysis of valid and timely soil quality data as a basis for the establishment of a soil monitoring system. 150 soil samples were collected across the city, according to pre-determined transects. Heterogeneity of main physicochemical soil properties, trace metals, PAH and PCB were determined by applying statistics and geostatistics. Initially, statistical indicators were compared with threshold values established by the Croatian government regulation as well as with the literature data for the soil of Central Croatia, soil worldwide and continental crust. Results showed that concentration of Cr, Ni, Pb, Zn, Hg and PAH deviate from baseline concentrations, while the distribution of the trace metal concentrations help to interpret their origin caused by anthropogenic and environmental factors. The statistically justified difference of the indicators between land uses was established only for general indicators (EC and granulometry), and Cu and Hg.

urban ecosystem, monitoring, soil properties, spatial heterogeneity, anthropogenic and environmental factors

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