Biological indices in the monitoring system of urbanized soils

Current methodological guidelines for assessing the quality of soils in populated areas do not include ecotoxicological indices, thereby underestimate the potential danger of the negative impact of urban soils on the health of the population. Monitoring of soil quality is carried out according to established indices. Sanitary-parasitological and sanitary-bacteriological studies, of course, play a primary role in the establishment both of the category of soil contamination in populated areas, and basic physic-chemical parameters. The list of controlled elements contains heavy metals, benz (a) pyrene, arsenic and several others, but there are no whole classes of chemical compounds with a high level of public health hazard, such as polychlorinated biphenyls, in spite of the fact that the study of the distribution of this group of substances in the soil profile of Moscow is being included in modern scientific research work for a long time. Thus, the lack of data on the content of a number of key chemical toxicants in the soil can form a distorted final assessment of the quality of the studied soils. Ultimately, this can lead to a number of mistakes in management decisions for the improvement of the territories of Moscow and the replacement of soils with artificially created soil. One of the solutions to this problem may be the expansion of the list of physic-chemical indices in monitoring. Another one is the inclusion of ecotoxicological indices for conducting a comprehensive diagnosis of “health” of soils. Such an approach will make it possible to assess the soils more correctly, taking into account all the factors of soil formation in the territory of Moscow, including intensive multifactor anthropogenic impact on soils, which is difficult to estimate only with the help of physical and chemical methods. In the work results of own researches on an estimation of the biological activity of soils of Moscow of various functional zones are presented. © 2017 Izdatel'stvo Meditsina. All Rights Reserved.