Geochemical Characteristics and Preliminary Assessment of Geochemical Threshold Values of Technology-Critical Elements i
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Geochemical Characteristics and Preliminary Assessment of Geochemical Threshold Values of Technology‑Critical Elements in Soils Developed on Different Geological Substrata Along the Sava River Headwaters (Slovenia, Croatia) Mavro Lučić1 · Neda Vdović1 · Niko Bačić1 · Nevenka Mikac1 Received: 30 July 2020 / Accepted: 1 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The increased demand for technology-critical elements (TCEs) in emerging technologies brings about the need to determine their spatial distribution in the environment and establish regulatory guidelines. In this paper, concentrations of Li, Sc, Nb, W, Ga, Ge, and REY (rare earth elements, including yttrium) in soils collected from different parent materials in the upper catchment of the Sava River (Slovenia, Croatia) were analysed. Results of multivariate (principal component analysis) and univariate (threshold methods) statistical techniques were used to determine geochemical characteristics of studied soils to identify the background variations and to establish geochemical threshold values. The investigated area is characterized by great lithological diversity and substantial variation of TCE concentrations. Among methods for assessment of geochemical threshold, the TIF (Tukey inner fence) and 97.5th percentile delivered the most reasonable results. Some exceedances above the 97.5th percentile were natural in origin, caused by local geology. These findings can provide baseline data because little is known about TCE variation on different geological substrata. Technology-critical elements (TCEs) are a heterogeneous group of elements (rare earth elements, platinum group elements, germanium, gallium, niobium, lithium, tungsten, antimony, etc.) with growing application in the emerging technologies (Cobelo-García et al. 2015; Romero-Freire et al. 2019). As their usage increased, it has become important to provide basic knowledge about their natural spatial distribution in different environmental compartments, soils Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00244-020-00781-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Mavro Lučić [email protected] Neda Vdović [email protected] Niko Bačić [email protected] Nevenka Mikac [email protected] 1
Division for Marine and Environmental Research, Ruđer Bošković Institute, Bijenička cesta 54, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
particularly (Alfaro et al. 2018; Filella and Rodríguez-Murillo 2017; Négrel et al. 2019). Soils along the upper catchment of the Sava River, an area spread in Slovenia and northwestern part of Croatia, have developed on diverse lithological units, which makes them very suitable for studying the variation of TCE concentrations. Heretofore, there is a lack of data on TCE geochemistry in soils developed on different geological substrata at the European scale. The most important studies include the European geochemical mappings (Reimann et al. 2018 and references therein; Salm
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