Evaluation of pollution load on contaminated land in north east england using an unmanned aerial vehicle with a multispectral image camera John Dean, Ibrahim Salaudeen, Edmond Sanganyado, Catherine E. Nicholson, Justin J. Perry Northumbria University, UK There has been great concern about the continuous surge in the level of hazardous contaminants being introduced into the environment consciously or unconsciously, mostly through anthropogenic activities. For example, heavy metal accumulations in soil from anthropogenic sources with subsequent consequences constitute a major global environmental problem. However, industrial revolution, urbanization, large-scale agricultural practices and consistent growth in human population constitute major drivers of environmental issues; this has resulted in devastation to the soil environment, with run-off leading to low-quality water due to the effects of pollution by toxic, persistent, and bio-accumulative contaminants, such as, heavy metals (e.g. Pb) 1 , organic contaminants (pesticides, petroleum hydrocarbons and PAHs) and other important emerging pollutants. Furthermore, in other to set quality standards and identify the hazards to human health, food safety and the environment, it is required to describe the sources and the levels of heavy metals in environmental media including the soil because environmental pollution caused by heavy metals is persistent, covert, and long-term. This project will investigate the pollution status of two sites in NE England, one a current ‘live’ industrial complex and the other, the site of a redundant coal mine (and now a country park) using a combination of remote sensing techniques (UAV) and laboratory-based analytical techniques to assess the contaminant load within the sites. Specifically, these studies will collect multispectral image data and field samples to assess the sites for both heavy metals and organic compounds present in the soil. The analytical techniques to be deployed are energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (ED-XRF) and gas & liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC- MS, LC-MS), respectively. The research will ascertain if continuous usage of the sites potentially poses any ecotoxicological risk on the users, as well as investigate the innovation of using multivariate statistical modelling of multispectral image remote sensing data 2 as an environmental validation tool. References 1. Ma, R. and Dean, J. R. (2022). Health risk assessment of lead in soils from an historic industrial site in North-East England. Separations , 9: 1-11. 2. Ahmed, S., Nicholson, C. E., Muto P., Perry, J. J., and Dean J. R. (2021). Applied aerial spectroscopy: a case study on remote sensing of an ancient and semi-natural woodland. PLOS ONE, 16: 1-19.
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