Showing papers by "Eric C. Brevik published in 2021"

Ecological risk assessment and source apportionment of heavy metals contamination: an appraisal based on the Tellus soil survey

Abstract: It is imperative to comprehend the level and spatial distribution of soil pollution with heavy metals to find sustainable management approaches for affected soils. Selected heavy metals (Mn, Zn, Pb, Cu, Cr, Ni, As, Co, and Cd) and physiochemical parameters were appraised for 620 samples from industrial, agricultural and urban sites in Northern Ireland using the Tellus database. The findings of this study showed that among the analyzed heavy metals, Mn content was the highest and Cd content the lowest. Pearson’s correlation analysis revealed that heavy metals were highly correlated with each other, signifying similar sources for the heavy metals. Mixed factors (anthropogenic and lithogenic) were responsible for the contribution of heavy metals as revealed by multivariate statistical analysis. The results of contamination factor and enrichment factor analyses suggest that As, Cd, and Pb showed very high risk for pollution in the study area. The geoaccumulation index revealed that with the exception of Cd, all analyzed heavy metals showed severe accumulation in the soils. The potential and modified ecological risk indices inferred that Cd, As, and Pb represented ecological threats in the soils of Northern Ireland. The findings of this study will aid in forming approaches to decrease the risks associated with heavy metals in industrial, urban and agricultural soils, and help create guidelines to protect the environment from long-term accumulation of heavy metals.

Planning for disposal of COVID-19 pandemic wastes in developing countries: a review of current challenges.

Abstract: The health sector is critical to the well-being of any country, but developing countries have several obstacles that prevent them from providing adequate health care. This became an even larger concern after the COVID-19 outbreak left millions of people dead worldwide and generated huge amounts of infected or potentially infected wastes. The management and disposal of medical wastes during and post-COVID-19 represent a major challenge in all countries, but this challenge is particularly great for developing countries that do not have robust waste disposal infrastructure. The main problems in developing countries include inefficient treatment procedures, limited capacity of healthcare facilities, and improper waste disposal procedures. The management of medical wastes in most developing countries was primitive prior to the pandemic. The improper treatment and disposal of these wastes in our current situation may further speed COVID-19 spread, creating a serious risk for workers in the medical and sanitation fields, patients, and all of society. Therefore, there is a critical need to discuss emerging challenges in handling, treating, and disposing of medical wastes in developing countries during and after the COVID-19 outbreak. There is a need to determine best disposal techniques given the conditions and limitations under which developing countries operate. Several open questions need to be investigated concerning this global issue, such as to what extent developing countries can control the expected environmental impacts of COVID-19, particularly those related to medical wastes? What are the projected management scenarios for medical wastes under the COVID-19 outbreak? And what are the major environmental risks posed by contaminated wastes related to COVID-19 treatment? Studies directed at the questions above, careful planning, the use of large capacity mobile recycling facilities, and following established guidelines for disposal of medical wastes should reduce risk of COVID-19 spread in developing countries.

Ecofriendly remediation technologies for wastewater contaminated with heavy metals with special focus on using water hyacinth and black tea wastes: a review

Abstract: Treatment of water contaminated with heavy metals is challenging. Heavy metals are non-degradable, persistent in the environment, have a high dispersion capacity by water, can bioaccumulate, and represent risks to human and environmental health. Conventional treatment methods have disadvantages; however, adsorption in biomass is a highly promising method with high efficiency and low cost that avoids many of the disadvantages of conventional methods. Black tea (BT) wastes and water hyacinth (WH) have attracted attention for their ability to remove heavy metals from wastewater. Utilizing these approaches can remove contaminants and effectively manage problematic invasive species and wastes. The conventional uses of BT and WH were efficient for removing heavy metals from wastewater. Due to the unique and distinct properties and advantages of biochar and nano-forms of biosorbents, the use of BT and WH in these forms is promising to achieve sustainable heavy metals removal from wastewater. However, more study is needed to confirm preliminary results.

Spatial variability of soil mineral fractions and bulk density in Northern Ireland: Assessing the influence of topography using different interpolation methods and fractal analysis

Abstract: Understanding how topography affects the distribution of soil properties is essential in the management of landscape hydrology and establishment of sustainable soil management practices. This study investigated the impact of topography on the variation in particle size distribution, coarse fragments, and soil bulk density using different interpolation techniques and fractal analysis. It also evaluated the performance of various interpolation techniques in predicting and characterizing the distribution of soil properties. The study was conducted using data from 620 samples extracted from the Tellus and LUCAS databases in Eglinton and Castlederg counties, Northern Ireland. Terrain attributes were obtained at a 30 × 30 m resolution using a global digital elevation model (GDEM) reintroduced to the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) projection. Interpolation analyses were conducted using inverse distance weighting (IDW), ordinary kriging (OK), block kriging (BK) and co-kriging (CK). Among the terrain attributes, elevation was the most influential covariate for CK. In addition, fractal analysis was conducted to assess the self-similarity of the soil properties. Prediction accuracy of the interpolation methods was evaluated using the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency, mean absolute error, index of agreement, and Pearson correlation coefficient. Spatial maps produced from the kriging techniques showed high accuracy in the prediction of soil particle size distribution and bulk density. The use of elevation as an auxiliary variable was successful in producing accurate soil property distribution maps with CK. The fractal parameters showed that the soil properties had short range spatial variability, anti-persistent nature, and strong spatial structure. Additionally, the fractal dimension was strongly correlated with sand, silt and clay contents and bulk density, and weakly correlated with the coarse fragments.

Available concentrations of some potentially toxic and emerging contaminants in different soil orders in Egypt and assessment of soil pollution

Abstract: The availability of potentially toxic elements in the soil is important to evaluate the risk they pose for humans and the broader environment. Implementation of environmental laws, especially in developing countries, makes it necessary to establish background concentrations for contaminants in soil. Soil samples from Aridisols, Entisols, and Vertisols in the northern Nile Delta, Egypt, were taken at three depths and extracted with Mehlich III (M3) reagent to evaluate the availability and potential ecological risk of some emerging contaminants (Ba, Cd, Co, Cr, Li, and Se). Concentrations of the studied elements in the 60–90 cm depth soil layer, which were used as background values, showed that Li concentration was highest in Aridisols and Entisols, while Ba had the highest concentration in Vertisols. The contamination status of the soils was addressed by calculating a variety of pollution indices. Vertisols were enriched in the studied elements, while the Aridisols and Entisols were not enriched to moderately enriched (relative to background values). This study provides an effective reference for the local background ‘available’ concentrations of the above-mentioned elements in different soil orders in the Nile Delta. Although many countries in the world built their environmental legislation on (pseudo)total element concentrations, these are not representative of the actual risk, and we recommend the use of M3 extraction and pollution indices to set up guidelines for trace element limits in the soils of Egypt.

Exploring the scaling law of geographical space: Gaussian versus Paretian thinking

Abstract: A debate has occurred concerning the laws of scale and the fractal nature of geographical space. Biodiversity and pedodiversity studies show the emergence of fractal structures such as taxa‐area relationships. Biodiversity and pedodiversity are natural resources, although some consider pedotaxa to be artificial. The studies carried out to date emphasize that many pedodiversity and biodiversity spatial patterns converge at the same regularities. Many of these studies used natural resources maps and their digital databases. Information is extracted from the taxa types contained in each polygon and the areas covered. However, the structure of the maps (number, area, fragmentation, etc.) has rarely been a matter of study. When map structure was studied, intriguing similarities were observed in pedodiversity and biodiversity analyses. To understand whether these similarities also appear in other types of spatial entities that are more artificial, a review of geospatial analyses that studied topics such as urban maps, land system maps, etc., was undertaken. The main variables in these maps are manmade and/or combinations of natural resources data layers. Regularities detected in the geospatial information of these latter topics also seem to conform to results obtained when analysing natural resources maps such as soils, rock types, landforms, plant communities, etc. Thus, some geographers consider the idea that there are far more small things/objects than larger ones across several orders of magnitude in geographic space to be a law. Some geographers also contend that the classical “Gaussian thinking” and its statistical tools should be replaced by a “Paretian thinking” and its related statistical tools. This paper analyses the above topics as well as the lack of adequate data and types of cognitive maps we use in our modern scientific society, supporting the conjecture that that we should include Paretian thinking in our research at least in the same way we use Gaussian thinking. HIGHLIGHTS: Long tail distributions, power laws and fractal‐like structures are ubiquitous in geospatial analysis. Scale invariance of natural and artificial map structures seem to be the rule. The Paretian approach appears to be more appropriate than the Gaussian approach for many purposes. Our cognitive maps and brain processing follow Paretian thinking in many instances.

Greenhouse gas balance and mitigation potential of agricultural systems in Colombia: A systematic analysis

Abstract: Agriculture is widely recognized as a source of considerable greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with opportunities for mitigation. The limited capacity to identify and collect reliable activity data and to quantify emissions by sources and removals by sinks needs to be addressed. One proposed solution is to adapt IPCC methodologies that include estimations of both CO2 emissions and carbon sequestration in agricultural systems, which were applied to Colombia at the farm level in this study. The aim of this work was to provide an assessment of GHG balances through these IPCC methodologies to identify potential GHG mitigation in sustainable agricultural systems used in Colombia that provide acceptable GHG trade‐offs to the atmosphere. Agroforestry systems made the largest contribution to this mitigation potential because of the potential to sequester carbon in both soil and biomass, giving a negative GHG emission to the atmosphere. GHG balance analysis at the Colombian farm level indicated that conventional agriculture with pastures of Pennisetum clandestinum in rotation with potatoes (PRP) in the Andean zone of Narino (Colombia) is a large emitter of GHG with 9.1 ton CO2eq ha−1 year−1. On the other hand, in livestock systems in the Andean zone (Antioquia), intensive silvopastoral systems with 500 Eucalyptus tereticornis trees ha−1 (SSPi) on pastures is a great neutralizer of GHG emissions, accounting for −26.6 t CO2eq ha−1 year−1. Agroforestry systems play a leading role, as crop rotation and improved pastures can represent a GHG mitigation opportunity for sustainable agricultural production at the farm level in Colombia. © 2021 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Medical Geology of Soil Ecology

Abstract: Soils influence human health in many ways, both positive and negative. These include the supply of nutrients; exposure to heavy metals, organic chemicals, and pathogens; the supply of antibiotics and other medicines; and soils may even support mental health. Soils can impact all aspects of the human system, from the skin to the respiratory tract, digestive and nervous systems, and beyond. Human management of the soil system can have a major impact on these influences. In particular, any management that supports soil health also supports human health. Establishing the health of a soil involves the measurement of soil biological, chemical, and physical properties. Future needs in the area of soil and human health include well-designed scientific studies that investigate the links between soil abiotic and biotic properties and human health as well as soil science links to soils and human health.

Land system diversity, scaling laws and polygons map analysis

Abstract: Numerous lines of evidence have been presented in the literature that show the patterns of pedodiversity and biodiversity are very similar. One of the most corroborated patterns lies in the fits of the relationships between biodiversity and soil diversity to power laws according to the increase in study area. Several authors have analysed the presence of fractal and multifractal features in pedodiversity and biodiversity analyses. Similarly, it has also been found that valuable information can be extracted from the polygons of soil and vegetation maps, which also have surprising similarities. These approaches concern information on the spatial distribution of natural resources. However, other more artificial but interesting maps and their comparison have been neglected by such studies. Land systems maps and their georeferenced databases fall into this latter category, and they include most of the soil‐forming factors. In this paper a georeferenced land system database and map were analysed and the results compared with those obtained in previous pedodiversity and biodiversity studies, primarily the spatial patterns of the polygons. The results showed that the analysed land system map units followed the same patterns that were previously found in pedodiversity and biodiversity studies; that is, the power law concerning richness–area relationships. The same patterns occur with the number of polygons. Some geographers claim there is a “law” that states that there are far more small things/objects than larger ones across several orders of magnitude in geographic space and thus this regularity conforms to scaling laws, independent of the resource involved. The results obtained corroborate this conjecture irrespective of whether natural resources or artificial cartographies were analysed. This paper represents a first test of land use maps; additional work in this area is needed. HIGHLIGHTS: Spatial patterns detected in natural and land system maps seem to be similar Composite GIS maps have the same spatial patterns as their base maps. Soil and land system units conform to long‐tail or heavy tail distributions. Soil maps and land system maps conform to power laws, fingerprints of fractal structures There are more small polygons than large ones across several magnitude orders on choropleth maps.

International Gender Equity in Soil Science: A Social Equity Issue

Abstract:

Gender equity is a concern in many scientific fields, including soil science. Lower percentages of women work as soil scientists than we have in the general population; fewer opportunities to serve on committees or as invited speakers at scientific meetings; lower selection rates for scientific awards; unconscious bias; tension with work-life balance; poor funding and pay; lack of career progression and a lack of networking opportunities. Advances have been made in many countries, although major discrepancies still exist and women are overall still a minority in soil science and related fields.

A review of international gender equity issues in soil science was undertaken by requesting gender data from 70 national soil science societies around the world; forty-three societies responded. Female members ranged from 0% to 69%. Thirty-six of the 43 societies had more male than female members; the global average was 68% male and 32% female. Some societies noted that women make up a majority of the younger soil science generation or women make up a larger percentage of the younger membership than of the total membership in their society. These findings indicate there is some progress in gender equity in these countries. However, higher numbers of women do not always mean the reasons for those higher numbers are positive. For example, the Bulgarian Soil Science Society mentioned that women were a majority of their soil scientists because soil science did not pay well and men would not take such a low-paying job. Twenty percent of the national soil science societies belonging to the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS) have a woman as their president. However, this is lower than the average female membership (32%) in these societies. This is an indication that women are underrepresented in leadership roles.

A rethinking of gender equity is needed to create a new paradigm that allows us:

1. To create an inclusive perspective that encourages respect, collaboration and solidarity between the genders. An education based on the full understanding that “equality does not mean that women and men will become the same but that women’s and men’s rights, responsibilities and opportunities will not depend on whether they are born male or female.”

2. An education that recognizes that soil is not only a natural resource, but also provides social, economic, cultural, political and patrimonial good. The soil not only allows humans to live on it, it supplies food, water and a legitimate sustenance to overcome poverty and to construct an identity, cultural and economic independence.

Therefore, legitimate land ownership is a key element in achieving gender equality for the construction of a just and equitable life, but also the only real way to end all forms of discrimination against women and girls. To improve equity in the sciences, including soil science, we need to educate in a way that changes the gender stereotypes that link science to stereotypes about masculinity. There is no equality without economic independence, and there is no economic independence without equal access to land ownership and land care.

Pivoting to online laboratories due to COVID-19 using the “Science of Agriculture” digital tools: A case study

Abstract: On March 12, 2020 Dickinson State University moved all classes to distance delivery (DD) in response to COVID-19 Faculty had only a brief opportunity to plan, as the turn-around to DD was very rapid Meaningful laboratory exercises were needed for SOIL 210 ? Introduction to Soil Science The senior author learned about the Science of Agriculture (SoA) website on a discussion board created by the Soil Science Society of America, which provided links to distance education resources Most of the resources from SoA addressed topics still to be covered in SOIL 210, and four of the semester's final six labs were developed using SoA: Understanding Data and Chemistry, Soil Chemistry, Dryland Soils, and Microbiology and Nitrogen Materials available on the SoA website include video clips, interactive exercises, and virtual labs While the virtual labs, with the exception of Sorption!, are not soil science focused, they cover basic skills that soil scientists use Each of the four labs utilized four to eight of the activities (video clips, interactives, and/or virtual labs) available on SoA, depending on the length of time each activity was expected to take and the number of activities available for the given topic Students were asked to answer specific questions related to their lab experience with the digital activities SoA provided useful tools to develop meaningful experiences for the SOIL 210 students in lieu of their traditional laboratory exercises This article is protected by copyright All rights reserved

Soils, Biofortification, and Human Health Under COVID-19: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract: Soil is an important source of resources required for human health and well-being. Soil is also a major environmental reservoir of pathogenic organisms. This may include viruses like the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), which through 2020 and 2021 created dramatic catastrophes worldwide as the causative agent of the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19). So, soil has both positive and negative impacts on human health. One of the major positive impacts is the transfer of nutrients from soil to plants, and from there to humans through their diet. Biofortification is able to enhance the levels of nutrients essential to human health in the crops we consume and represents a sustainable solution to address malnutrition, which in turn may strengthen the human immune system against COVID-19. This nutrient transfer works better when we have healthy soils. Therefore, soils and biofortification have important roles to play in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic. However, several questions still remain, such as what are the expected environmental impacts of COVID-19 on soil? Can SARS-CoV-2 be transmitted through soil, and under what conditions? Which soil processes and properties influence SARS-CoV-2 survival rates and times, as well as transmission? What are the specific links between soil health and COVID-19? What are the projected soil management scenarios in response to COVID-19? Questions such as these deserve more attention as the world seeks to recover from its most recent pandemic.