soil

One of the most commonly asked questions of redevelopment of contaminated sites is whether the site can be used for human habitation and whether it can be implemented into urban development. In order to address this question we need to assess the spatial degree of contamination and evaluate the risks involved. This risk is highly dependent on various aspects of land use, the type of people that are involved (for instance the age category), the time spent in the contaminated site, etc. At present, different areas of the NW-Europe region have different risk assessment procedures to assess human risks, however, little is know on the spatial variation that occur in contaminated sites. We would not like to re-invent the wheel, but rather integrate modules of these existing procedures in our spatial and visual risk systems. Obviously, as we cannot model every single aspect of risk for all different age groups, so we will focus on the risks for the most vulnerable age groups, i.e. small children. In this project we will integrate the existing legislative framework of the UK, Flanders (Belgium) and the Netherlands into a Decision support system. This will allow the end-user to evaluate the soil contamination in a European perspective. Our primary focus will be on heavy metals as they are the contaminant most frequently occurring in contaminated areas and because they have been extensively studied.

All across Europe soils are contaminated with heavy metals, PCBs and organochlorine pesticides, like DDTs and HCHs. Many heavily polluted soils have been categorized as brownfields, indicating that their destination needs revision. The here presented Interreg IIIB-project faces the challenge to quantify the actual impact of pollution on resident wildlife. The aim of the present project is to provide accurate predictions of the risk of polluted soils to terrestrial organisms. The collected data will be used to develop a user-friendly tool that allows environmental policy and decision makers to redefine the destination of brownfields. Since contemporary risk assessments do not integrate spatial components, like foraging behaviour and micro-spatial variation in soil pollution, they most often lack ecological relevance.