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Record W4408161141 · doi:10.3390/pollutants5010006

Source Apportionment and Risk Assessment of Heavy Metals in Soils During Dry and Rainy Seasons in Southern Malawi

2025· article· en· W4408161141 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenuePollutants · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicHeavy metals in environment
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsApportionmentWet seasonHeavy metalsDry seasonEnvironmental scienceSoil waterGeographyEnvironmental chemistrySoil scienceChemistry

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The recent increase in industrial activities has raised concerns regarding environmental quality in urban areas in Malawi. In this study, the contents of heavy metals [copper (Cu), zinc (Zn) and cadmium (Cd)] were analysed in 15 sites selected from Makata, Limbe, Maselema, Chirimba, and Maone industrial zones of Blantyre City in Malawi. Soil sampling was conducted during dry and rainy seasons, followed by laboratory analysis. The results revealed a few cases of elevated content of heavy metals exceeding permissible England and Canadian standards with higher content detected during the dry season than in the rainy season. Chirimba soil had the highest mean Zn content of 822 mg/kg in the rainy season and 579 mg/kg in the dry season. Maone soils had the highest Cd content, measuring 2.09 mg/kg in the rainy season and 3.06 mg/kg in the dry season. Chirimba soils also had the highest Cu content with levels of 105 mg/kg in the dry season and 79 mg/kg in the rainy season. The geo-accumulation index indicated that Zn posed the most severe pollution. The results of the Positive Matrix Factorisation model suggest that heavy metal pollution primarily originates from metal processing and manufacturing industries, followed by plastic manufacturing industries. This finding is supported by the nature of emissions from these sectors, where metal processing activities release heavy metals through particulates and waste to the environment, suggesting collective actions to prevent soil contamination.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.020
Threshold uncertainty score0.686

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.259
Teacher spread0.251 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it