Elemental analysis and mapping of some natural waters in Eastern Black Sea Region and investigation of their effects on environment and human health

Bu çalışmada, Doğu Karadeniz Bölgesi’ndeki 7 ildeki (Artvin, Rize, Trabzon, Giresun, Ordu, Gümüşhane ve Bayburt) doğal kaynak sularının elemental analizinin yapılması ve bu analiz yardımıyla, jeoistatistik analiz kullanılarak bölgenin tamamının elemental olarak dağılımının belirlenmesi amaçlanmıştır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda, Doğu Karadeniz Bölgesi’ndeki 40 adet doğal kaynak suyu örneğinde ICP-OES cihazı yardımı ile elemental analiz (Na, Al, P, Cl, K, Ca, V, Mn, Fe, Ni, Cu, Zn) yapılmıştır. Her bir element için Doğu Karadeniz Bölgesi’ndeki ortalama kimyasal analiz değerleri sırasıyla; 10270, 215, 122, 4749, 1093, 15960, 59, 5, 89, 18, 10 ve 90 µg/L olarak bulunmuştur. Elde edilen sonuçların genel olarak Dünya Sağlık Örgütü ve Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Sağlık Bakanlığı’nın izin verilebilir değerleri ile uyumlu olduğu görülmüştür. Ayrıca dünya üzerinde farklı noktalarda gerçekleştirilen benzer çalışmalarla da yapılan karşılaştırma neticesinde genel bir uyum gözlenmiştir. Jeoistatistik analiz kullanılarak her bir elementin çalışma alanındaki dağılımı belirlenmiş ve haritalandırılmıştır. Bu dağılım haritaları vasıtasıyla, numune alınmamış yerlerdeki suların da kimyasal dağılımları hakkında tahmini bir sonuç elde edilebilmiştir. Son olarak, bu çalışmada analiz edilen elementlerin insan sağlığı için olası etkileri ve hangi bölgelerin element fazlalığı dolayısıyla risk altında olduğu tartışılmıştır.In this study, it was aimed to make an elemental analysis of the natural spring waters in 7 cities (Artvin, Rize, Trabzon, Giresun, Ordu, Gümüşhane and Bayburt) in the Eastern Black Sea region and to determine the elemental distribution of the entire region using geostatistical analysis with the help of this analysis. In accordance with this purpose, elemental analyses (Na, Al, P, Cl, K, Ca, V, Mn, Fe, Ni, Cu, Zn) were carried out with the help of ICP-OES device for 40 samples of natural spring water in Eastern Black Sea Region. The average chemical analysis values for each element in Eastern Black Sea Region were as 10270, 215, 122, 4749, 1093, 15960, 59, 5, 89, 18, 10 and 90 µg / L, respectively. The results were generally consistent with the permissible limits of World Health Organization and the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Turkish. In addition, a general harmony was observed as a result of the comparison made with similar studies carried out at different points in the world. Using geostatistical analysis, the distribution of each element was determined and mapped in the study area. By means of these distribution maps, an estimated result could also be obtained about the chemical distributions of waters in unsampled locations. Finally, the possible effects of the analyzed elements on human health and which areas being under risk due to excess elements were discussed in this study

Literature review of Indoor radon surveys in Europe

Natural radioactivity is the main source of population exposure to ionising radiation. Radon and its progenies contribute with more than 50% to annual effective dose received from all sources of ionising radiation (UNSCEAR, 2000) and has been identified as a second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking (WHO, 2009). The aim of this report, under the MetroRadon project, is to provide a literature review of existing indoor Rn surveys in Europe. Different steps of the “survey chain”, e.g. from survey design through sampling, measurements to evaluation and interpretation, that yield an output have been explored. Journal papers and papers in international and national conference proceedings were reviewed, resulting in data collected from 45 countries. The information contained in the report should serve as an input to propose approaches to reduce inconsistencies and improve harmonization of indoor radon data.JRC.G.10-Knowledge for Nuclear Security and Safet

National soil data in EU countries, where do we stand?

At the European scale, soil characteristics are needed to evaluate soil quality, soil health and soil-based ecosystem services in the context of the European Green Deal. While some soil databases exist at the European scale, a much larger wealth of data is present in individual European countries, allowing a more detailed soil assessment. There is thus an urgent and crucial need to combine these data at the European scale. In the frame of a large European Joint Programme on agricultural soils launched by the European Commission, a survey was conducted in the spring of 2020, in the 24 European participating countries to assess the existing soil data sources, focusing on agricultural soils. The survey will become a contribution to the European Soil Observatory, launched in December 2020, which aims to collect metadata of soil databases related to all kind of land uses, including forest and urban soils. Based upon a comprehensive questionnaire, 170 soil databases were identified at local, regional and national scales. Soil parameters were divided into five groups: (1) main soil parameters according to the Global Soil Map specifications; (2) other soil chemical parameters; (3) other physical parameters; (4) other pedological parameters; and (5) soil biological features. A classification based on the environmental zones of Europe was used to distinguish the climatic zones. This survey shows that while most of the main pedological and chemical parameters are included in more than 70% of the country soil databases, water content, contamination with organic pollutants, and biological parameters are the least frequently reported parameters. Such differences will have consequences when developing an EU policy on soil health as proposed under the EU soil strategy for 2023 and using the data to derive soil health indicators. Many differences in the methods used in collecting, preparing, and analysing the soils were found, thus requiring harmonization procedures and more cooperation among countries and with the EU to use the data at the European scale. In addition, choosing harmonized and useful interpretation and threshold values for EU soil indicators may be challenging due to the different methods used and the wide variety of soil land-use and climate combinations influencing possible thresholds. The temporal scale of the soil databases reported is also extremely wide, starting from the '20s of the 20th centuryEuropean Joint Program for SOIL “Towards climatesmart sustainable management of agricultural soils” (EJP SOIL)European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 862695

Retrospective on U.S. Health Risk Assessment: How Others Can Benefit

Dr. Paustenbach reviews the scientific underpinnings of about twenty years of health risk assessment practice and their implications for environmental policy. He observes that more than 600 peer-reviewed papers provide a wealth of information that can save other countries billions of dollars. He also briefly reviews risk-assessment practices outside the U.S

EJP-CONCERT. D3.7 Second joint roadmap for radiation protection research

EJP-CONCERT Work Package 3, Deliverable 3.7

Climate change impact assessment under data scarcity

According to current climate projections, Mediterranean countries are at high risk for an even pronounced susceptibility to changes in the hydrological budget and extremes. These changes are expected to have severe direct impacts on the management of water resources, agricultural productivity and drinking water supply. The different regions of the Mediterranean landscape are already experiencing and expecting a broad range of natural and man-made threats to water security. Current projections of future hydrological change, based on regional climate model results and subsequent hydrological modeling schemes, are very uncertain and poorly validated. The Rio Mannu di San Sperate Basin, located in Sardinia, Italy, is one test site of the CLIMB project. The catchment has a size of 472.5 km2. The catchment was already affected by multi-drought periods (1990-2000) (Piras et al. 2014). The process-based Water Simulation Model (WaSiM) was set up to model current and future hydrological conditions. The availability of measured meteorological and hydro-logical data is poor as it is common for many Mediterranean catchments. The lack of available measured input data hampers the calibration of the model setup and the validation of model outputs. A soil sampling campaign was conducted together with the department of Geography of the University of Kiel to assess more precisely the physical properties of the top soil (30cm depth) at 239 locations in the Rio Mannu catchment. Different deterministic and hybrid geostatistical regionalization methods like Multi-Linear Regression, Inverse Distance Weighting, Ordinary Kriging and Regression Kriging (Odeh et al. 1995) were used to calculate spatially distributed maps of particular lab-analyzed soil information. The applied regionalization methods were then tested on the prediction performance. The best performing prediction method was used to calculate a new classified soil texture map for the catchment. Soil hydrological properties were assigned to the soil texture classes by pedo-transfer functions. WaSiM was then parameterized in 2 different settings. One setting (WASiM-ARU) used the standard available soil information of Aru et al. (1990) and the other (WASiM-RKS) the improved new soil information. The WaSiM-ARU setting was used for calibration and validation. WaSiM-ARU was calibrated and validated with spatially distributed evapotranspiration rates derived with the triangle method (Jiang and Islam, 1999) and soil moisture records, due to missing adequate gauging information in the catchment. The modeled evapotranspiration result girds using WaSiM-RKS setup with the improved soil model setup show a better fit especially for the growing season to those derived from remote sensing without further calibration. Both WaSiM setups were driven with the meteorological forcing taken from 4 different ENSEMBLES climate projections for a reference (1971-2000) and a future (2041-2070) times series. The climate change impact was assessed based on differences between reference and future time series and with climate change indices like the standardized difference precipitation index, the evapotranspiration index and by the number of consecutive flow conditions. Furthermore long-term annual and monthly mean changes were analyzed. The simulated results show a reduction of all hydrological quantities in the future. Furthermore simulation results reveal an earlier onset of dry conditions in the catch-ment. The comparison of modeling results shows that the quality of the soil model setup has a major impact on the spatial distribution of modeling outputs. Finally runoff modeling results of both WaSiM setups were compared to other modeling results which were processed with other hydrological models in the test site within CLIMB. Those models used a very similar setup as WaSiM-ARU. The comparison shows a significant uncertainty in the processed results based on to the applied hydrological model. Especially in ungauged catchments like the Rio Mannu those uncertainties need to be considered in the climate change impact assessment analysis, the resulting adaption strategies and for the policy decision making. However, findings also show that the quality of soil input and parametrization creates uncertainties when using WaSiM that are in the same range as the uncertainties produced by the different applied hydrological models. The study shows that the combination of sophisticated climate model downscaling and bias correction techniques, improved hydrological model parametrization with improved soil information, and validation with in-situ and remote sensing measurements, has a high potential to improve environmental impact assessment in data scarce regions

Overview of Radon Flux Characteristics, Measurements, Models and Its Potential Use for the Estimation of Radon Priority Areas

Radon flux measurements provide information about how much radon rises from the ground toward the atmosphere, thus, they could serve as good predictors of indoor radon concentrations. Although there are many different mapping methods with many different input data, radon flux data are generally missing and are not included for the delineation of radon priority areas (RPA). The aim of this literature review is to investigate to what extent radon flux was used, or could be used, for the delineation of RPAs. Numerous factors influencing radon flux were identified, but quantifying their contribution to radon flux measurement still remains a challenge. Different methods and measuring devices were used for the determination of radon flux, thus it is necessary to identify possible inconsistencies in order to harmonise different radon flux measurements. Due to the complexity of radon flux measurements, only two countries were identified to have performed national surveys on outdoor radon, which were of much smaller scale compared to those on indoor radon. A positive correlation between radon flux and radon quantities, such as radon in soil gas and indoor radon, indicates that radon flux could be used as an input parameter for the estimation of RPA. By reviewing radon flux models, it was concluded that up-to-date modelled radon flux maps have reached excellent spatial resolution and will be further improved, hence, they could serve as an input for the estimation and delineation of RPA