Bioavailability Of Copper And Its Assessment In Soil From Different Areas Of China

The paper focused on the international trend of ecological risk assessment of heavy metal in soil and employed the bioavailability concept to study and evaluate the ecological risk of Cu in soil. Farming or gardening topsoil were sampled from 8 typical areas in China. Barley was chosen as the experimental plant and eco-toxicology method was used to study the bioavailability of Cu depending on the soil properties.Barley root length, biomass and absorbed Cu concentration in root were selected as the experiment endpoints. Ecological effect of Cu on barley was analyzed by S-Logistic model for dose-response analysis. The model was used to calculate the threshold value of effective concentration of total Cu concentration, ECx, and added Cu concentration, ECxa , which causing X% inhibition of barley root length and biomass compared with unamended control samples. The results showed that: EC50a from root length data was the best parameter to analyze the bioavailability of copper in 8 different soils. EC50a ranged from 58.1 to 429.5mg/kg. The wide range of EC50a indicated that the Cu bioavailability of 8 soils have significant differences. The order of bioavailability of Cu in 8 different soils was: zhangzhou>haikou>yantai>wuwei>xizang>shanghai>tongren>luoyang.