Abstract
Strontium (Sr) is not an essential element to plants; however, high soil-to-crop transfer factors (TFs, concentration ratios between crop and soil) of this element are often found because calcium, in the same element group as Sr, is an essential element for plants. In this study, we report the soil-to-crop TFs of four alkaline earth elements (Mg, Ca, Sr, and Ba) obtained by collecting elemental concentration data in the edible part of crops together with elemental concentration data in agricultural field soils sampled at the time of harvest and checking correlations among these TFs. We found that TFs were well correlated between Ca and Sr, and also between Sr and Ba; for example, by t-test, R = 0.929 was obtained between logarithm values of TFs of Ca and Sr, and R = 0.816 was obtained between logarithm values of TFs of Sr and Ba. Because of the high correlation between TFs of Ca and Sr, it was implied that crops having high TFs of Ca would show high TFs of Sr. We also compared the TFs of global fallout 90Sr and stable Sr as measured above. The results showed that TFs of 90Sr were slightly higher than those of stable Sr in brown rice, spinach and Chinese cabbage possibly because of the difference in physicochemical forms in soil between 90Sr and stable Sr. Further, using the obtained TF data, we analyzed 90Sr concentrations in crops observed after the Fukushima nuclear accident.
Keywords
- Alkaline earth elements
- Soil
- Crop
- Transfer factor
- Radiostrontium
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This work was partially supported by the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Japan.
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Tagami, K., Uchida, S. (2018). Soil-to-Crop Transfer Factors (TFs) of Alkaline Earth Elements and Comparison of TFs of Stable Sr with Those of Global Fallout 90Sr. In: Gupta, D., Walther , C. (eds) Behaviour of Strontium in Plants and the Environment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66574-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66574-0_6
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