Vol. 10 No. 2 (2019)
Research Article

Copper concentration in the soils of the Danube floodplain between the rivers Timok and Vit northwestern Bulgaria

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  • Velimira STOYANOVA ,
  • Tsvetan KOTSEV,
  • Georgi ZHELEZOV,
  • Michaela SIMA ,
  • Erika-Andrea LEVEI
Categories

Published 2019-01-01

Keywords

  • Lower Danube, Danube’s lowlands, heavy metals, wetland pollution

How to Cite

STOYANOVA , Velimira, Tsvetan KOTSEV, Georgi ZHELEZOV, Michaela SIMA, and Erika-Andrea LEVEI. 2019. “Copper Concentration in the Soils of the Danube Floodplain Between the Rivers Timok and Vit Northwestern Bulgaria”. European Journal of Geography 10 (2). https://www.eurogeojournal.eu/index.php/egj/article/view/182.
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This paper presents an actual and overall picture of soil contamination with copper in the Bulgarian part of the Danube floodplain between the rivers Timok and Vit. Three sampling campaigns in October 2012, April 2013, and October 2017 are carried out in the frame of two
studies. The total content of copper is determined by atomic spectrometry in the soil fraction < .100 mm in the first study, and by X-ray fluorescence spectrometry in the soil fraction < 0.063 mm in the second survey. The copper concentration in the collected topsoil and subsoil samples ranges between 9.5 – 742.7 mg/kg with a median of 34.4 mg/kg. About 94 % of the samples exceed the background reference value, 10 % are above the maximum admissible concentration, and 3 % violate the intervention threshold. The copper content peaks in the Timok Valley and decrease downstream the Danube to nearly steady levels east of the Vidin Lowland.

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