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Abstract: The elemental composition of soils is governed by geogenic processes and anthropogenic activities. A comprehensive soil study was conducted on a national level, in which the elemental composition of soils from two different layers was compared with the intention to differentiate between natural and anthropogenic sources of elemental enrichments. Topsoil (0–5 cm) and subsoil (20–30 cm) samples were collected from 249 different locations on a national scale (Slovenia). Elemental composition for 55 major, minor, and trace elements (ICP-MS, aqua regia digestion) was determined on the fraction <0.063 mm. By calculating the enrichment ratios in different lithological units, it was determined that levels of Ti are higher in soils overlying metamorphic and igneous rocks, Zr and Ca are more abundant over carbonates, while levels of Ni are higher in soils overlying marlstones. Elevated levels of Hg were detected in subsoils in the historical Hg mining area in Idrija, which indicates the presence of nearby orebodies as a potential source for the geochemical anomaly. Spatial distribution of elements showed that higher levels of Pb, Zn, Cu, and Hg were detected in topsoils of urban areas, indicating that anthropogenic sources could be the potential cause of soil contamination. Pb, Zn, Cu, and Hg levels were up to four times higher in topsoils compared to subsoils sampled at historical mining areas (e.g., Mežica, Idrija, Litija), which shows that historical mining left a significant environmental impact. Although mining and smelting activities ended a few decades ago, soils in some areas are still heavily enriched with various metals. Some other potential anthropogenic sources of elements were identified, such as farming and ironworks. Based on the results of this study, we can conclude that by comparing elemental compositions of soils from different layers, we can recognise the origin of elemental enrichments.
Keywords: smelting, mining, urbanisation, traffic, ironworks, weathering
Published in DiRROS: 18.03.2024; Views: 98; Downloads: 37
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Abstract: Raw materials are of great importance for humankind as they enable the development of technology, drive industry and economy, and overall the lifestyle we know today. The paper is addressing the topic of interactive learning about the mineral raw materials, i.e. metals and non-metals. Due to population growth and consequently in-creased global demand for raw materials, there is a need to educate younger generations about the raw materials and their properties and origin, so they would know from an early age where the mineral products they use come from and how purchase decisions affect the social environments of people who live in countries with resources exploitation.Todayʼs trends in mining are oriented towards more sustainable exploitation and management, taking into account the economic, social and environmental aspects. An example of such is exploitation of secondary raw materials from tail-ings and heaps. But in some countries, mining is stuck in the past, using obsolete technologies causing increased pol-lution and strongly present linear economy approaches of take-use-dispose attitudes or even unethical approaches, such as children being exploited as a cheap workforce, people being abducted, tortured and even killed over minerals (min-erals being exploited in such way are called blood or conflict minerals). Further, due to the potential negative impacts on health and safety, due to the emissions in air, water and surface disturbance, the public perception of mining is still perceived as negative in most cases. School curriculums most often lack description of current situations in the global mining. Therefore, within the EIT RawMaterials BRIEFCASE and 3D BRIEFCASE projects the project partners provide the comprehensive view of the issues of todayʼs mining and use of raw materials. The paper presents the description of both projects and the non-conventional teaching methods - the hands-on and digital tools for pupils and teachers, i.e. the briefcases, the "Briefcase of mineral applications" game, workshops and the supporting materials. The main objective of projects is to raise the pupils awareness about the utility and indispensability of minerals and mining and the consequences of their uses and production systems, which would increasein the long term the awareness about the social and environmental consequences of raw material production.
Keywords: raw materials, mining, pupils and students, non-conventional teaching tools, BRIEFCASE, 3D BRIEFCASE, curricular planning, EIT RawMaterials
Published in DiRROS: 04.12.2023; Views: 226; Downloads: 104
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Abstract: Nowadays, it is really important and crucial to follow the new biomedical knowledge that is presented in scientific literature. To this end, Information Extraction pipelines can help to automatically extract meaningful relations from textual data that further require additional checks by domain experts. In the last two decades, a lot of work has been performed for extracting relations between phenotype and health concepts, however, the relations with food entities which are one of the most important environmental concepts have never been explored. In this study, we propose FooDis, a novel Information Extraction pipeline that employs state-of-the-art approaches in Natural Language Processing to mine abstracts of biomedical scientific papers and automatically suggests potential cause or treat relations between food and disease entities in different existing semantic resources. A comparison with already known relations indicates that the relations predicted by our pipeline match for 90% of the food-disease pairs that are common in our results and the NutriChem database, and 93% of the common pairs in the DietRx platform. The comparison also shows that the FooDis pipeline can suggest relations with high precision. The FooDis pipeline can be further used to dynamically discover new relations between food and diseases that should be checked by domain experts and further used to populate some of the existing resources used by NutriChem and DietRx.
Keywords: text mining, relation extraction, named entity recognition, named entity linking, food-disease relations
Published in DiRROS: 25.05.2023; Views: 353; Downloads: 168
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