Heavy Metal Content and Physico-Chemical Analyses of Soils under the Litter of some Medicinal Taxa in the Luki Biosphere Reserve, Democratic Republic of the Congo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aim: The aim of this study was to compare the texture, mineral element and heavy metal content of the soil under the litter of different selected species in relation to the plan of their pedogenesis. Methods: The granulometric analysis of the various samples based on laser diffraction, measurements of Total Nitrogen and Total Organic Carbon were performed using the Elemental Analyzer, the Organic Matter content is estimated by the loss of ignition method using a Salvis furnace, In order to estimate the CaCO3 content. The same samples were heated in the oven at 1000°C for 60 minutes and reweighed. The carbonate content is estimated by the loss in mass during this second firing, multiplied by 2.274 which is the molecular weight ratio between CaCO3 and CO2. The heavy metal and mineral composition was evaluated by ICP-AES and AAS. Results: The granulometric analyses show a sandy texture, according to the FAO classification. The organic matter content thus observed in the soils under the litter of these four species did not show any significant difference. The concentration of major mineral elements recorded in soils under the litter of Blighia welwitchii, Oncoba welwitschii, Zanthoxylum gilletii and Harungana madagascariensis did not show any significant difference. However, potassium, phosphorus, and magnesium have a high concentration compared to calcium and sodium. This study showed that the levels of cadmium, lead, arsenic and aluminum in the various samples of litter soils of all plant species including nickel for B. welwitschii are above the standards set by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment for soil quality. Pollution factors for aluminum are the highest. This indicates that aluminum is the most polluting metal. The low pollution factors for lead and nickel are due to the low fixation of these metals by soils. Conclusions: Our study took place in the Luki Biosphere reserve and showed that the different soils under litter are polluted by very toxic and persistent heavy metals such as cadmium, lead, aluminum, arsenic and nickel. This study has revealed new aspects of heavy metal pollution. This pollution represents a serious threat to the environment in general and to humans in particular through the food chain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".