Please join us on June 30th, 2023 starting at 14:15.
No need to register - just show up in EBI -100.
António Rangel is our guest speaker.
Summary
Soil protection has become an important environmental, agronomical, and economical issue for European Union. Agricultural sustainability and productivity are under serious threat due to climate change, which is worsened by practices relying on excessive use of agrochemicals. Loss of soil fertility is a major risk to agriculture value chains, which must be preserved and improved through sustainable soil and above-ground management practices, also for its important cultural heritage. These growing concerns have increased the need to monitor soil nutrients and contaminants. The development of reliable analytical processes is important for mapping not only the general soil quality but also the spatial and temporal distribution of the targeted nutrients/contaminants; it is also quite important to devise real-time analytical tools for the study of contaminants leaching into ground waters. In this scenario, integrated methods that would include analyte extraction, sample preparation, and analysis steps, would be rather useful. The use of flow-based methods for this purpose is rather challenging as flow methods have essentially proved their usefulness for automating wet-chemistry procedures applied to aqueous samples. However, some developments have been reported, mostly centered on the automation of the analytical process after analyte extraction, additionally, some methods have also been described integrating the whole analytical process, comprehending both analyte extraction and measurement. In this communication, some of these issues will be discussed and our contribution to devising methods for the determination of some nutrients and metal ions in soil samples will be presented.