Science of the Total Environment 407 (2009) 59615970

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Science of the Total Environment

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / s c i t o t e n v

A GIS-based human health risk assessment for urban green space planning An example from Grugliasco (Italy)
Laura Poggio a,, Borut Vraj b
a b

The Macaulay Land Use Research InstituteIntegrated Land Use Systems, Craigiebuckler, Aberdeen, AB158QH, UK Agricultural Institute of Slovenia, Hacquetova 17, SI1001 Ljubljana, Slovenia

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
The need to develop approaches for risk-based management of soil contamination, as well as the integration of the assessment of the human health risk (HHR) due to the soil contamination in the urban planning procedures has been the subject of recent attention of scientic literature and policy makers. The spatial analysis of environmental data offers multiple advantages for studying soil contamination and HHR assessment, facilitating the decision making process. The aim of this study was to explore the possibilities and benets of spatial implementation of a quantitative HHR assessment methodology for a planning case in a typical urban environment where the soil is contaminated. The study area is located in the city of Grugliasco a part of the Turin (Italy) metropolitan area. The soils data were derived from a site specic soil survey and the land-use data from secondary sources. In the rst step the soil contamination data were geo-statistically analysed and a spatial soil contamination data risk modelling procedure designed. In order to spatially assess the HHR computer routines were developed using GIS raster tools. The risk was evaluated for several different land uses for the planned naturalistic park area. The HHR assessment indicated that the contamination of soils with heavy metals in the area is not sufcient to induce considerable health problems due to typical human behaviour within the variety of urban land uses. An exception is the possibility of direct ingestion of contaminated soil which commonly occurs in playgrounds. The HHR evaluation in a planning case in the Grugliasco Municipality conrms the suitability of the selected planning option. The construction of the naturalistic park presents one solution for reducing the impacts of soil contamination on the health of citizens. The spatial HHR evaluation using GIS techniques is a diagnostic procedure for assessing the impacts of urban soil contamination, with which one can verify planning options, and provides an important step in the integration of human health protection within urban planning procedures. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received 5 May 2009 Received in revised form 10 August 2009 Accepted 24 August 2009 Available online 19 September 2009 Keywords: Soil contamination Human health risk GIS modelling Urban planning

1. Introduction The contamination of urban soils and the problems related to it have been the subject of interest amongst scientists, city administrations and planners in recent years (see for example: Birke and Rauch, 2000; Romic and Romic, 2003; Madrid et al., 2004; Lee et al., 2006; Zhang, 2006). A conclusion from research and planners is that environmental effects, possible risk, and land-use restrictions, costs/benet assessment and soil remediation strategies, need to be integrated in the spatial planning procedures. The human health risk (HHR) due the soil contamination should be carried out during the preparation of health risk-based landmanagement approaches in order to: i) estimate the health risks in a given area in order to establish the necessity and priority of soil remediation or land-use change; ii) set generic or site specic remedial goals; and, iii) to assess remaining risks due to the soil contamination after the remediation or land-use change. However, the HHR assess-

Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 1224395270; fax: +44 1224 395036. E-mail address: l.poggio@macaulay.ac.uk (L. Poggio). 0048-9697/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2009.08.026

ment should be in general determined considering the land use (Markus and McBratney, 2001). The integration of land-use suitability and longterm environmental protection has to be taken into consideration in order to: i) protect the human health, ii) improve planning decisions in terms of the quality and usability of urban soils as a part of city environment, iii) protect and adequately manage soil as natural resource (European Commission, 2006a,b), and iv) design strategies to achieve more sustainable urban environment (European Commission, 2006b). This approach is strongly induced by the role and importance of functions that soils perform in urban areas. The health risk related to the use of the contaminated soil is important because the land use, i.e. the human behaviour within the land use, determines the effects of the exposure of the human receptor to the soil contamination. In general, the HHR is investigated and related to the toxicity of chemicals as well as exposure to these chemicals for potential receptors (Nathanail et al., 2005). According to Hooker and Nathanail (2006), the HHR is one of the most important tools to provide the relevant assessment in controlling and managing soil contamination. HHR is quantied through a risk model that assumes a linear relationship between the intake chemical dose and the risk to health of the individual.

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The soil pollution data and results of HHR evaluation are traditionally presented in a non-spatial form. The spatial evaluation and visualization of the HHR is important to better understand how the sources of risk, the receptors and the exposure pathways are distributed in the space (Bien et al., 2004). The results of soil contamination mapping embedded in a Geographic Information System (GIS) better facilitate the identication of contaminated areas where the interaction between humans and the polluted soil may occur. Furthermore, geo-databases may integrate ancillary information for risk assessment which facilitates the decision making process. Typically, the spatial information is about the emission sources, type and distribution of pollutants, population density, locations of public utilities and topography. The interactions between trace metals and the urban environment can be assessed by overlaying the heavy metal (HM) distribution with other relevant urban spatial data, e.g. trafc network, locations of industrial facilities, emission sources, and/or topographic conditions that might inuence the distribution of pollutants (Li et al., 2004). Additionally, the scale of potential health impacts may be assessed by comparing the demographic information data to population health records. As noted by several researchers, the presentation of risk greatly benets from a spatial approach mostly by the modelling of effects of spatial HHR evaluation, land-use changes and other spatial attributes. The implementation of risk models within GIS is a benecial and practical approach (Korre et al., 2002; McGrath et al., 2004; Liu et al., 2006). Thus, the need to develop soil contamination risk-based landmanagement approaches with the integration of human health risk (HHR) assessment activities has increased in last years. So far, few studies (e.g. Li et al., 2004; Lee et al., 2006; Zhang, 2006) have used GIS in the analysis of the HM distribution in urban environments, and only a few others have utilized GIS for HM risk modelling (e.g. Bien et al., 2004; Hough et al., 2004; Gay and Korre, 2006). The aims of this study are: i) to explore the ways, possibilities and benets of the spatial implementation of the Human Health Risk Evaluation (HHRE) quantitative risk assessment methodology, used to assess risks to human health due to the soil contamination described in Poggio et al. (2008a); and, ii) to develop an example of the spatial HHRE implementation in a practical urban planning case of a development green area, utilizing the raster GIS modelling. The outputs of the spatial HHRE implementation i.e. human health risk maps, should provide important information for better environmental management, efcient use of soil resources and for remediation measures in cities. Additionally, this case example should stimulate the city administrations to upgrade soil pollution information (often already embedded in urban environmental information systems) with HHR risk models, and the urban planners to participate in the mitigation of soil contamination effects by adequate planning. The spatial implementation of the HHRE helps to answer questions such as: How high is the risk to human health due to the exposure to soil contamination in a certain area? Is the area suitable for the planned land use regarding HHR? Where are located the most suitable areas for the considered land use? 2. Materials and methods 2.1. Area description The municipality of Grugliasco is located in the western hinterland of Torino, a large industrial city in the northwest of Italy, as part of the Torino metropolitan area. The city is situated on a geomorphological regular alluvial plain, rich in serpentine rocks with a weak south-east slope towards the Po River. Like original bedrock the parent material on which the soil has developed is naturally enriched in Cr and Ni. The high quality of the soils in this area provide no, or little, limitation to agricultural activities, being deep, structured, well drained, rich in

nutrients and thus, very fertile (Regione Piemonte, 1990, 2000, 2005). During the period of increasing urban spread of Torino, and the development of the car manufacturing industry between 1950 and 1970, the population increased six-fold to approximately 39,000 inhabitants by 2007. The high quality agricultural areas diminished or were highly fragmented to satisfy housing and trafc needs of the expansion of the Torino suburbs. Today, the Grugliasco Municipality shows a mosaic of agricultural, residential, industrial, trafc and service land uses (Fig. 1). The expansion of the industry contributed to the anthropogenic HM pollution. Currently the prevailingly land use in the area is agriculture (77%), intersected by trafc infrastructure (10%), university campus (8%), and school yards (5%). A large naturalistic area (park) of app. 450 ha is planned to be established on the east side of Grugliasco Municipality over the next few years. The park is intended to be an important green space in the middle of the urban areas, spatially linked to other planned or existing seminatural areas, forming the green belt of Torino (Sambugaro et al., 2004). It is intended that this green space contributes towards improving the quality of life of citizens and decreases adverse impacts of urban life on inhabitants (van Kamp et al., 2003). The park will be composed of different ecosystems, mainly semi-natural areas, interlacing agricultural areas, frequently meadows and elds. Only a small region of the planned area will remain under residential, industrial or trafc infrastructure land uses. 2.2. Acquiring soil information The soils of the complete area of Grugliasco Municipality were sampled at two different densities. The territory of the municipality was covered with fty-four predened sampling points. A regular 500 500 m sampling grid was used, with each grid cell further divided into 100 100 m sub-cells. In the northeast of the city centre, a denser grid of 250 250 m was used, with each grid cell further divided into 50 50 m sub-cells. The denser grid was utilized to more easily accommodate sampling points in scarce patches of bare soil (Fig. 2). Soil samples were dried at 20 C, disaggregated and sieved through a 2 mm mesh size plastic sieve. All samples were analysed for pH, organic matter content, cation exchange capacity and particle size distribution. HM concentrations were measured by ame atomic absorption spectrometry using four different extraction methods: aqua regia, acid acetic, diethylene triamine pentaacetic acid and a modied-Physiologically Based Extraction test (Ruby et al., 1996; Ure, 1996). The metal fractions obtained by these extractions are denoted as pseudototal, easily mobilisable, plant bioavailable and human bioaccessible, respectively. Table 1 summarises the main soil properties and the concentrations of heavy metals for the considered extractions. 2.3. Human health risk evaluation The HHR was estimated following the Human Health Risk Evaluation (HHRE) method (Poggio et al., 2008a). The method estimates health risks derived from human exposure to heavy metals in soil, adopting the risk-based, sourcepathwayreceptor transfer of pollutants. The nal output of the method is the Risk Index (RI), a value giving an indication of the HHR in the evaluated area, considering the exposure within the individual land use, as sum of the risks from different pathways (hazard quotients) and HM concentrations in soil. An RI value of 1.0 means that the heavy metal concentrations in the soil are close to the amount that can be taken up by the human body through various pathways over a lifetime, without resulting adverse health effects (Hough et al., 2004). A value higher than 1.0 for the RI suggests that a person may experience adverse health effects during a lifetime and it is undesirable when looking at the overall health of an exposed population and a very high RI can have serious effects on human health. A value below 1 identies risk

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as negligible. The RI indicates the relative severity of the risk (Poggio et al., 2008a). Generic land-use groups are dened based on the human activity and its sensitivity in relation to the HM exposure. For each land-use group the weighting factor, the so-called Land Use Risk Coefcient (LURc), was dened. The coefcients represent the occurrence of different pathways in the land uses considered. More detailed discussion on how the coefcients were derived is found in Poggio et al. (2008a). The LURc values, as they were dened for the case of Grugliasco study, are presented in Table 2. The land uses planned in the area of the green belt project were identied and matched to the HHR denitions of land uses (Table 3). The correspondence was established trough analysis of the potential occurrence of receptors within the land use, i.e. the possibility that risk will impact on human health as suggested by Xenidis et al. (2003). Agricultural elds, allotments gardens and the road network were easily matched with the groups described in this methodology, whereas the other classes required a careful pollutantreceptor pathways analysis. According to the green belt project description (Sambugaro et al., 2004), the park will be an area of land uses where the direct contact of humans with soil, in terms of ingestion, inhalation and dermal contact (RIVM, 2001), is seldom likely to occur. Additionally, the most important HM pathway to the human receptor, the food chain, is almost non-existent due to the planned minimization of agricultural areas in the nal park. Therefore, the LURc and HHRE settings for parkland were used. A similar situation is expected for the planned articial wetland area, where a direct contact with the soil will never occur. The university park was considered as a recreational area due to a high probability of direct human contact with soil. The sport park was evaluated as a playground, because the risk of inhalation of contaminated soil particles in dust is considered to be high during sport activities (US.EPA, 1991; CCME, 1999; NEPC, 1999).

2.4. Geostatistical processing of heavy metals concentration data The spatial distribution of the point dataset of HM concentrations was modelled in order to assess the HM concentrations in soil pollution for the whole of the municipality. The interpolation resulted in raster grids for each HM. All statistical analyses were performed using the package R version 2.8.0 (http://www.r-project.org) with geoR package for geostatistical methods. The independency of datasets was tested with ANOVA. The variograms were modelled using the maximum likelihood method (REML; Lark, 2000b). The REML method has the advantage of being more efcient than other procedures, thus requiring less data to obtain a reliable estimate of the data. It does not require ad hoc denition of lagclasses, thus avoiding a smoothing of the spatial structure (Minasny and McBratney, 2005). The variograms were estimated using the robust estimator suggested by Cressie (1993), and Lark (2000a), as many soil properties have a positively skewed distribution, e.g. of trace metal contents. The parameters used are presented in Table 4. The range was consistent among the different HM. The nugget, i.e. the residual spatial uncorrelated noise, is often very low, and always below 0.4. The condence intervals were calculated with a Bootstrap method (Saby et al., 2006). The variance explained (R2 MAD, mean absolute deviation) by the chosen models is generally higher than the 20% often reported in similar cases (e.g. Frangi and Richard, 1997; Hedbrant and Sorme, 2001; Webster and Oliver, 2001; Minasny and McBratney, 2005). The variogram models were not optimal, but their signicance was such that the spatial interpolation could be performed. The validation of the variogram model was done with a leaving-oneout cross-validation. Each data item is deleted in turn and then estimated from the remaining data. The results from cross-validation were used to calculate the median of the square standardised error (MSSE). The expected value for this statistic is 0.455 (Lark, 2000a). The

Fig. 1. Urban park planned in Grugliasco.

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Fig. 2. Sampling scheme (modied from Poggio et al. (2008b)).

data were log-transformed for the geostatistical computations and then back-transformed to the original scale. The data were interpolated using the ordinary kriging technique (Webster and Oliver, 2001) at a 25 m resolution, and nally imported into ArcGIS as ESRI grids where cell values express the concentration (mg/kg) in soil for each processed HM. 2.5. Spatial implementation of the HHRE assessment The HHRE method was implemented in the ArcInfo GIS environment (ESRI). The Risk Index (RI) (Fig. 3) was calculated on a cell-bycell basis trough an Arc Macro Language (AML) routine developed for the purpose, implementing the following formula: 1 LURc TT

RI = HQ pathway HQ = HMsoil IRDE

HM

described in Poggio et al. (2008a) was used to calculate the values of factors and threshold. The AML input data were separate raster ArcInfo grids derived from secondary/ancillary information, and from the previously described geostatistical analysis: i) interpolated concentrations of heavy metals, ii) land-use information, and iii) social data. The toxicological information/parameters were integrated in AML as variables. The core AML code was based on the HHRE algorithms (Poggio et al., 2008a), and further developed for spatial data processing. The AML performs calculations on a cell-by-cell basis in two steps. First, separate RI grids were calculated for each of the processed landuse groups listed in the HHRE procedure. Then, a composite RI grid which covers the whole municipality was created. The RI grids of individual land uses were combined using the proposed scenario of land use. The cell values of the nal HHRE grid, in a 25 m resolution, represent the potential HHR due to soil contamination with regard to the planned/ future land use. 3. Results and discussion

where: HQ IR DE TT = = = = hazard quotient for each pathway considered Intake Route factor Daily Exposure factor Toxicological threshold

3.1. Spatial distribution of heavy metals concentrations in Grugliasco soils The separate grids of interpolated heavy metal concentrations (see examples for the pseudototal content: Fig. 4lead, and Fig. 5nickel) illustrate the spatial extent the individual HM concentration in soil.

The factors and threshold can be calculated with most of the existing risk assessment models. In this case study the method

L. Poggio, B. Vraj / Science of the Total Environment 407 (2009) 59615970 Table 1 The chemical and physical properties of the sampled soils and the pseudototal, plant bioavailable, easy mobilisable, and human bioaccessible (1st and 2nd phases) concentrations (mg/kg) (Poggio et al., 2008b). Mean SE Mean General soil properties pH OM CEC Sand Silt Clay Cr Cu Ni Pb Zn Cu Ni Pb Zn Cu Ni Pb Zn Cu Ni Pb Zn Cu Ni Pb Zn 6.7 0.12 4.32 0.30 16.7 1.13 43.3 2.34 46.0 2.05 10.6 0.45 80 2.1 65 3.7 114 2.2 75 4.5 146 8.1 15.8 1.26 4.7 0.26 18.6 1.44 13.5 1.39 2.6 0.63 4.1 0.15 1.7 0.18 16.5 2.11 15.7 1.84 7.8 0.33 16.7 1.14 35.3 5.42 25.5 2.26 14.0 0.48 3.9 0.29 24.1 3.77 Median MAD 7.1 1.02 3.89 0.93 16.5 1.72 43.5 3.04 45.5 2.96 11.0 1.01 76 11.1 60 15.6 113 12.6 66 30.4 132 42.2 15.0 8.90 5.0 2.97 15.5 7.41 10.0 5.93 1.5 0.74 4.0 1.48 2.0 1.48 13.0 7.41 12.0 6.67 8.0 10.38 16.0 12.60 21.5 11.48 21.0 2.97 13.0 12.60 4.0 2.90 14.5 11.12 Table 3 Relationships between the park land uses and the HHRE land-use groups. Risk of pathway occurrence Direct ingestion Agricultural areas Allotment gardens Naturalistic area Trafc areas/network Sport playgrounds Wetland area School yard Technological park University campus Water well ** *** * *** * *** ** ** * Food chain *** *** HHRE land-use group

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Pseudototal

Plant bioavailable

Agricultural: elds within city borders Agricultural: allotments Parkland Trafc and services Playground Parkland Playground Recreational Recreational Parkland

Easily mobilisable

Where *** = High risk: pathway risk nearly certain to occur. ** = Medium risk: pathway risk reasonably likely to occur. * = Low: pathway risk seldom to occur. = Negligible: pathway risk not likely to occur.

Human bioaccessible 1st phase

Human bioaccessible 2nd phase

SE = standard error, MAD = mean absolute deviation. OM = organic matter, CEC = cation exchange capacity.

Cu and Zn showed comparable spatial patterns to those of Pb (Fig. 4), while Cr and Ni (Fig. 5) have a similar distribution (Poggio et al., 2008b). Therefore, examples for Pb and Ni are presented here. The higher concentrations of Cr and Pb in soils in the south-east area can be related to the main car factory of Torino, which is situated nearby close to the south-east corner of the Grugliasco Municipality. The hotspots of concentration in the residential areas are ascribed to local sources of contamination linked to the long period of historical use of soils in that area. However, the information available at this stage is not sufcient for a detailed explanation of the sources of the detected hotspots. To justify rm conclusions a larger number of samplesa denser sampling grid would be needed. This is an important issue for risk management and related planning. The higher HM concentrations are located in the area of the planned park that was previously an intensive agricultural zone. The visualization of distribution of contaminants facilitates immediate appreciation of the spatial changes of HM concentrations and enables the identication of areas where soil contains hazardous

concentrations for each processed HM (Markus and McBratney, 1996). The distribution of HM concentrations in urban soils typically shows very complex spatial variability, in particular due to variations in anthropogenic activities, point contamination sources at hotspots and diffuse pollution, and the parent material. Such variability causes problems for conventional geostatistical analysis using Matheron's (1965) estimator of the variogram. For this reason the use of more robust interpolation methods, such as maximum likelihood variogram estimation (Rawlins et al., 2005), was considered. Similar to those reported by Saby et al. (2006), the results in this test case showed the possibility to compute a statistically signicant indication of the distribution of the HM contamination in metropolitan regions and industrial areas, even with a sampling scheme that has no optimal density (Tiller, 1992; Birke and Rauch, 2000; Linde et al., 2001). The results obtained from the geostatistic modelling can provide information for decisions relating to soil remediation, for the setting of soil quality protection guidelines, and for determining the soil suitability for particular land uses.

3.2. Assessment of human health risk for recent land uses The maps of the spatial distribution of heavy metals were used as inputs for the HHRE computation. Only the results relating to the spatial extent of planned park are presented and discussed here. This area is a mosaic of different land uses (Fig. 6) in which different types of recreational uses, with different levels of exposure of citizens to the soil contamination, will be prevalent. Table 5 presents the extent and a brief description of planned land uses. The results of the application of the HHRE method in the park area for the a) present and b) planned land-use situations are shown in Fig. 7.

Table 2 Land Use Risk Coefcients (LURc) for ten land uses present in the Grugliasco case study area. LURc Ingestion Residential: dense areas Residential: family houses areas Playground Recreational Parkland Agricultural: allotments Agricultural: elds Commercial Industrial Services 0.7 1.0 1.0 0.7 0.7 1.0 0.7 0.1 0.1 0.1 Food chain 0.3 0.7 0.1 0.1 0.1 1.0 1.0 0.1 0.1 0.1

Table 4 Parameters used to dene HM variograms. Dataset Variogram Range Nugget Sill Residual standard error 0.0077 0.1550 0.071 0.1927 0.1493 pvalue <0.01 <0.01 <0.01 <0.01 <0.01 MSSE R2 median MAD 0.268 0.383 0.587 0.368 0.498 0.22 0.28 0.42 0.45 0.22

Cr Cu Ni Pb Zn

Exponential 217 (all) 331 515 443 294

0.07 0.24 0.01 0.33 0.31

0.93 0.76 0.99 0.67 0.69

Condence levels for MSSE median: 0.2590.631.

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Fig. 3. Steps of spatial implementation of the HHRE method in a raster GIS model.

Fig. 4. Spatial distribution of Nickel as calculated by the log-normal ordinary kriging.

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Fig. 5. Spatial distribution of Lead as calculated by the log-normal ordinary kriging.

The HHR estimation for the current, mainly agricultural, land uses showed a high value for the risk index in 55% of the planning area (Table 6). The main reason is the production of food on the area of contaminated soil and consequently the higher HM risk to humans through the food chain pathway. A high HHR in some areas (22%) corresponds to the high HM soil contamination in the area.

Very low HHR was identied in the location of the university campus and school yard, as a consequence of a combination of the lower exposure to contaminants and the lower HM concentrations in soil. For the planned land uses, the analysis shows a general decrease in the HHR, mainly due to the decrease in the extent of the agricultural use of the area. The HHR is lowered by interruption in the food chain

Fig. 6. Current (a) and planned (b) land uses in the park area.

5968 Table 5 Description of planned land uses in the park area. Land use Description

L. Poggio, B. Vraj / Science of the Total Environment 407 (2009) 59615970 Table 6 Area (%) of Risk Index classes. Area occupied (%) 31.6 0.5 Risk Index classes 1 2 3 4 5 Very low risk Low risk Medium risk High risk Very high risk Current situation 24 0 0 55 22 Planned situation 68 0 0 21 12

Municipal cemetery. 1.1 Green areas with extensive recreational use. 14.5 Ornamental wood with scattered areas. The vegetation is as close as possible to the natural climax, e.g. Alnetum glutinosae association for humid areas and Querco-carpinetum association for dry area. Roads and Road network inside the park and parking places for 11.2 parking the visitors Sport park Typical urban sports area. The surface will be covered 6.3 with grass and app. 30% of area with wood. 0.3 Swamp area It will occupy a surface of 20,000 m2. It will be used as shelter for wild animals, mainly birds. The human and lake presence will be limited to the paths. School yard Garden included in the surface of a school structure. 4.9 Technological Urban garden with grassland and some bush/tree 7.1 park spots. University Urban garden with grassland and some bush/tree 22.1 park spots, surrounding the buildings of the University. Water well Area surrounding a pit used for drinkable water. 0.5

Agricultural areas Allotment gardens Cemetery Naturalistic park

Meadows and arable crops cultivations. Family gardens area for vegetables production.

3.3. HHR scenario modelling The study shows that the heavy metal concentrations in Grugliasco soils are not high enough to induce health problems with the exception through the food chain and direct ingestion (children playground). This is further illustrated by comparing three land-use groups with different occurrences of the pathways considered. Fig. 8 presents the spatial distribution of values of the risk index calculated for three different land-use scenarios: a) agricultural, b) residential, and c) recreational. In the case of agricultural land use, both the direct ingestion and the food chain pathways are considered, with a Land Use Risk Coefcient (LURc) of 1. The average risk index for the whole area is 4.5. In the case of residential use, the direct contact with soil is considered to have a lower possibility of occurrence and has a LURc of 0.7. The occurrence of a food chain is almost negligible (LURc of 0.3), but is still present due the possibility of gardens. However, the exposure is considered to be constant. The average risk index is 2.1. In the case of recreational land use, the direct ingestion (LURc= 0.7) is considered only for a limited period of exposure over the year, equal to 210 days. The risk for the whole area is very low, with a risk index of 0.75. In this case study only the pathways through food ingestion and direct contact were included,

pathway. In this case, the change of land use from agricultural to recreational can be considered as a good option for the reduction in HHR from HM contaminated soil (Xenidis et al., 2003). The HHR will be high or very high in the areas of the remaining agricultural land uses, where food is produced.

Fig. 7. Human health risk index for current (a) and planned (b) scenarios in the park area.

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Fig. 8. Human health risk index maps and average value for the whole area for agricultural (a), residential (b) and recreational (c) land uses in the park area.

while inhalation was considered negligible due to the climate and environmental conditions. These examples illustrate the importance of identications of the main pathways for the considered risk in order to be able to minimise and mitigate effects of soil contamination in urban areas without destroying or sealing the soil resource. Contaminated soils, even when exceeding local/ national legislation threshold values (Poggio et al., 2008b; Gazzetta Ufciale della Repubblica Italiana, 1999) can still perform important environmental functions. In the case of this study the food production function of soil should be limited, while other (recreational, carbon cycle, and biodiversity, etc.) can still be performed. 3.4. Planning options The high HHR risk areas are currently under meadow land use and will remain high in areas where no land-use change is planned. In order to reduce the HHR different management/planning options should be reconsidered: Land-use change from a recreational area to urban forest or ornamental gardens. In these cases the contact of humans with soil will be reduced and the food chain not included. To encourage/introduce land used where soil is covered with dense grass To interrupt food chain by limiting agriculture and grazing. The HHR evaluations conrm that the planning option of constructing the park is a suitable solution not only from the aesthetic and other urban needs. It represents advisable solutions also for reducing the risk of heavy metal soil contamination to human health, as it is an open space with low contact of people with soil, and does not include food production. Furthermore, the solution is important also from the soil protection aspect. The planned land-use change is reversible and the soil resource is not destroyed as it would be in case of sealing of the area. Thus, although being contaminated, the soil still has the capacity of performing important ecological functions. The

performance of carbon sequestration, water ltering, biodiversity, gene pool and other functions could be altered for a certain degree, but can be expected to be generally preserved.

4. Conclusions The HHRE assessment method denes an aggregated risk index providing the information of the potential human health risk due soil contamination. Human health risk information in a spatial form is suitable for integration into the planning process, in which GIS tools and techniques are in regular use. The HHRE assessment method is used to express the potential human health risk due soil contamination in urban areas in a form of an aggregated risk index. The integration of the HHR method into a GIS followed by a spatial modelling and identication of risk areas provides multiple benets. GIS implementation of the human health risk assessment provides important information for city administrations to enable assessments of potential living conditions in the urban environment, through spatial identication and quantication of sources, pathways and receptors. The areas of greater concern for human health can be spatially identied and health risk can be better quantied within current and scenario modelling by evaluation of different planned land-use options. The spatial HHR information can be used to steer the planning process, to assess the needs and potential impacts of land-use planning, to design the necessity, to set the priority of remedial actions and to improve planning decisions. The all-overs benets can be reduced health risks to inhabitants in cities. Thus, the impact of soil contamination to the health of citizens can be minimised by appropriate planning solutions. Such information should play an important role in the management of urban soils. HHRE spatial procedure offers a more exible exploitation of information about soil contamination and a powerful tool for the communication of the spatial distribution of sources of risks to human health.

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Acknowledgements The work was partly carried out within the TUSEC-IP (Techniques of Urban Soil Evaluation in City RegionsImplementation in Planning Procedures) ProjectInterreg IIIB-Alpine Space Program, nanced by the European Commission. References
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