Risk assessment of soil-plant transfer of pollutants in urban agriculture
Résumé
With artificialization and densification of (sub)urban areas, there is an emphasis for kitchen gardens which offers the opportunity to reintroduce nature in cities, create social links, and a willingness to eat healthy. Nevertheless, this involvement in urban agriculture can result in land use changes that may increase the exposure to pollutants for citizens, for example, in the case of redeployment of brownfield sites. Thus, the compliance between state and use of an environmental media has to be checked.
In this context, two databases were created, one dedicated to trace elements (BAPPET) and the other one to organic pollutants (BAPPOP) both relative to kitchen garden crops contamination in different contexts of soil pollution. The aim of these databases is to make data available for environmental diagnostics to use it (i) to compare site specific results to scientific literature data and (ii) to evaluate in a predictive way pollutant concentrations in plants based on the environmental media concentrations.
In the current context of health-environment concerns, our project (PlantEval2.0) aims at (i) updating the databases based on an overview of the scientific literature on the last decade and (ii) optimizing databases to user needs. Based on the trace elements updated database, a modelling approach is developed to create a decision supporting tool to predict trace metal evolution in urban agricultural soils. This model may help to improve a decision supporting tool (Destisol’AU) create to better score functions related to soil contamination by mineral or organic pollutants. All these different parts gathered in databases and the modelling approaches should provide a more accurate prediction of pollutant transfer from soil to kitchen garden crops and more globally better assess the soil compliance with a kitchen garden use in land use strategies.