Long-term risks of inadequate management practices on the sustainability of agricultural soils

This report describes the major result of a research project funded by the INCO-Copernicus programma of European Commission under Contract number ERB-IC15-CT98-0133. The study focused on the long-term environmental risk of soil acidification on: (i) mobilisation and leaching and (ii) plant uptake of potentially toxic heavy metals (i.e. lead, cadmium, zinc and copper) from well-drained agricultural soils in Slovakia and Hungary. The research was mainly carried out in the period 1998-2001, but there was a strong delay in the final reporting of the results as summarised in this report. This report includes the major papers resulting from this study. The major result obtained from the various studies is that transfer functions and soil-to-plant transfer relationships, allowing the calculation of dissolved metal concentrations and plant meta contents from soil metal contents accounting for differences in soil properties, such as pH and organic matter content, in the solid phase, are practical and reasonably reliable approaches for use in regional risk assessments, as carried out for Hungary and Slovakia