Abstract
Sulfonamide antibiotics can enter agricultural soils by fertilisation with contaminated manure. While only rough estimations on the extent of such applications exist, this pathway results in trace level contamination of groundwater. Therefore, we studied the transport of three sulfonamides in leachates from field lysimeters after application of a sulfonamide-contaminated liquid manure. In a 3-year period, the sulfonamides were determined in 64% to 70% of all leachate samples at concentrations between 0.08 to 56.7 µg L−1. Furthermore, sulfonamides were determined in leachates up to 23 months after application, which indicated a medium- to long-term leaching risk. Extreme dry weather conditions resulted in highest dislocated amounts of sulfonamides in two of the three treatments. Furthermore, soil management such as tillage and cropping affected the time between application and breakthrough of sulfonamides and the intra-annual distribution of sulfonamide loads in leachates. Although the total sulfonamide leaching loads were low, the concentrations exceeded the limit value of the European Commission of 0.1 µg biocide L−1 in drinking water in more than 50% of all samples. Furthermore, the medium-term mean concentration of the sulfonamides ranged from 0.08 and 4.00 µg L−1, which was above the limit value of the European Commission in 91 out of 158 samples. Therefore, sulfonamides applied to soils in liquid manure under common agricultural practice may cause environmental and health risks which call for a setting up of more long-term studies on the fate of antibiotics.
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Acknowledgements
The project was funded by the Scholarship programme of the German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU, grant no. 20003/498). Parts of the LC-MS/MS system were funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, grant no. Th 678/6-2) and the Mass Spectrometry Laboratory of the Rostock Soil Science Group was funded by the “Exzellenzförderprogramm” of the Ministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, project UR 07 079. We gratefully acknowledge the technical support of Britta Balz, Jette Schwarz and Kai-Uwe Eckhardt, University of Rostock. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer, whose valuable comments significantly improved the quality of the manuscript.
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Appendix
Appendix
Water storage in three lysimeters from sandy loam under cultivation following agricultural practice resulting from the calculation of the water balance according to the capacitive Turc-Wendling approach (ATV-DVWK 2002; see Table 2 for details; the vertical broken line indicates the turn of the hydrological year)
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Aust, MO., Thiele-Bruhn, S., Seeger, J. et al. Sulfonamides Leach from Sandy Loam Soils Under Common Agricultural Practice. Water Air Soil Pollut 211, 143–156 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11270-009-0288-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11270-009-0288-1