Source Apportionment and Geostatistics: An Outstanding Combination for Describing Metals Distribution in Soil

The purpose of this paper is to present the potential of the combination of source apportionment methods and geostatistics. We want to outline the possibilities of this combination for the investigation of soil pollution. Therefore, we focused on the identification of sources in the vicinity of an iron smelter and the different element distribution in this area. We determined the concentration of 15 elements in the aqua regia digestion of 60 soil samples in an area of 12 km(2). In the current study, the application of two different source apportionment methods onto the data set and comparison of the results are presented. The focus was on absolute principal components score analysis with multiple linear regression and multivariate curve resolution with alternating least-squares. Four different sources in the region of interest could be detected. The source composition profiles and contribution profiles for both methods are alike. Furthermore, the distribution of the elements caused by each source with isoline plots could be visualized. The distribution is unique for each source and hence, element- and source-specific. Thus, the combination of the results of source apportionment methods with geostatistics is a powerful tool to evaluate and describe the content and distribution of metals in soil.