Metal Speciation In The Environment

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Metal Speciation in the Environmental held in Cesme, Turkey, October 9-20, 1989

Metal Speciation and Contamination of Soil provides a thorough overview of the biogeochemical processes governing the behavior, transport, and bioavailability of heavy metals in contaminated soils and suggests alternative approaches for effective remediation. This important new book contains contributions from experts in various disciplines who explore the issues from theoretical, experimental, and pragmatic perspectives. Topics include redox chemistry, kinetics of metal reactions, spectroscopic characterization of metal ion reactions at surface, modeling hydrologic transport phenomena and colloid-associated transport of metals through the soil profile to ground water, and remediation alternatives.

Considerable recent research has focused on the topic of chemical speciation in the environment. It is increasingly realised that the distribution, mobility and biological availability of chemical elements depend not simply on their concentrations but, critically, on the forms in which they occur in natural systems. Continuing developments in analytical chemistry have made speciation practicable even where analytes are present at trace levels (as is often the case in natural samples). In the second edition of this book, the expertise of scientists involved in chemical speciation in various fields have been brought together to provide an overview of the current status of speciation science and indicate how the field may develop in the future.

This publication deals with fundamental concepts and models, speciation measurements and field applications in metal speciation and bioavailability in aquatic environments. This volume provides a thorough review of current developments concerning the interactions between trace metals and aquatic organisms.

This book presents new results on metal fluxes from society to the environment, on metal speciation in water, soil and sediment, and its mobility, biological uptake and toxicity. New approaches, like the Acid Volatile Sulphide (AVS) concept to predict metal bioavailability in sediments, and the Biotic Ligand Model to calculate the toxicity of metals to aquatic organisms, are critically evaluated, with a focus on copper, nickel, zinc, and, chromium.

Introduction to speciation; General strategies for speciation; Direct methods of metal speciation; Hybrid methods of speciation; Predicting chemical speciation and computer simulation; Speciation of metals in the atmosphere; Speciation in fresh waters; Speciation in soils; Speciation of trace metals in sediments and combustion waste; Speciation of radionuclides; The speciation of metals in biological systems; Trends and developments.

Report, the editors replaced the term "speciation" wherever it occurred by "identification and quantification," or "description of abundance," or "reactivity," or "transformation" of a chemical species, according to whichever one of the four meanings the author had evidently meant to convey. In line with the Dahlem Workshop Model, this Report comprises the background papers written in advance of the meeting on the current status of problems in environmental research and on advanced analytical tech niques for the identification and quantification of chemical species, as well as the group reports summarizing the results of the discussions held during the meeting. Each group report was prepared during the meeting by one "rapporteur" with the help of members of that group and finalized by the rapporteur (listed as the first author of the group report) after the meeting, taking into account both verbal comments made during the presentation of the reports in the plenary session at the end of the workshop and written comments received afterwards.