Environmental toxicology and biogeochemistry of ecosystems
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EDITORIAL
Environmental toxicology and biogeochemistry of ecosystems Muhammad Aqeel Ashraf 1,2 & Muhammad Faheem 1
# Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
The fresh environment has comprised of clean air, soil, and water elements without human intervention or pollution involvement. The mixing of unwanted pollutants into these elements leads to the contamination of a fresh environment and disturbance of the ecosystem (Ashraf and Hanfiah 2017). There might be several routes including natural and anthropogenic activities that contributed to environmental deterioration. These routes include volcanic eruption, mineral weathering, fossil fuel burning, forests destroying, and industrial and agricultural activities. However, human intervention has reflected more provoking deleterious impacts on environmental quality and ecosystem sustainability (Häder et al. 2020). Pollutants such as trace elements (TEs), heavy metals (HMs), VOCs, PM1–10, microplastic, crude oil, nutrients, and synthetic organic materials (chemicals) especially emerging contaminants (ECs) including endocrine-disrupting compounds (EDCs) have been considered the main threat to the ecosystem due to their toxicological effects in all animal species to date (Gioia et al. 2011). Besides, environmental toxicology promotes wildlife mortality, which results in biodiversity issues. All around the globe, the contaminated sites proliferate everywhere. Therefore, there is a need to assess the technical feasibility of suggested solutions for the sake of maintaining environmental quality and ecosystem health. Due to the persistent nature of pollutants, some of them like TEs, HMs, PCBs, and PAHs can accumulate in the environment and finally become a part of the food chain through feed crops intake, which results in health risks like respiratory,
Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues * Muhammad Aqeel Ashraf [email protected] 1
Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, School of Environmental Studies, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China
2
International Water, Air & Soil Conservation Society, 59200 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
cardiovascular, and skin issues as well as neurotoxicity effect especially in human beings (Rhind 2009). For example, TEs have a tremendous role in the biogeochemical cycle. The TEs are available in plenty in various ecosystems both through natural and anthropogenic means. A detailed understanding of the release of TEs both under dynamic aerobic and anaerobic conditions prevail in deltaic soils is the key parameter to focus, as their increased movement through various mobilization routes is responsible for the availability of their higher concentrations in food crops (Rinklebe et al. 2017). The intake of these contaminated crops as a diet source becomes a cause of health risks to human beings, although the effect of individual chemicals on its exposure could disrupt normal functions (Fig. 1). However, the exposure of a combination of a variety of pollutants at once can be more effective than individ
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