Mapping risks associated with soil copper contamination using availability and bio-availability proxies at the European scale.

Soil contamination by trace elements like copper (Cu) can affect soil functioning. Environmental policies with guidelines and soil survey measurements still refer to the total content of Cu in soils. However, Cu content in soil solution or free Cu content have been shown to be better proxies of risks of Cu mobility or (bio-)availability for soil organisms. Several empirical equations have been defined at the local scale to predict the amount of Cu in soil solution based on both total soil Cu content and main soil parameters involved in the soil/solution partitioning. Nevertheless, despite the relevance for risk assessment, these equations are not applied at a large spatial scale due to difficulties to perform changes from local to regional. To progress in this challenge, we collected several empirical equations from literature and selected those allowing estimation of the amount of Cu in solution, used as a proxy of available Cu, from the knowledge of both total soil Cu content and soil parameters. We did the same for the estimation of free Cu in solution, used as a proxy of bio-available Cu. These equations were used to provide European maps of (bio-)available Cu based on the one of total soil Cu over Europe. Results allowed comparing the maps of available and bio-available Cu at the European scale. This was done with respective median values of each form of Cu to identify specific areas of risks linked to these two proxies. Higher discrepancies were highlighted between the map of bio-available Cu and the map of soil total Cu compared to the Cu available map. Such results can be used to assess environmental-related issues for land use planning.

Responses of soil nitrification activities to copper after a moisture stress.

Some steps of the soil nitrogen (N) cycle are sensitive to environmental pressures like soil moisture or contamination, which are expected to evolve during the next decades. Individual stresses have been well studied, but their combination is not yet documented. In this work, we aimed at assessing the importance of the soil moisture on the impact of copper (Cu) contaminations on the N cycling soil function using the potential nitrification activities (PNA) as bioindicator. A two-step experiment was performed. First, a loamy soil was incubated 5 weeks in either 30, 60, or 90% of its water holding capacity (WHC) or alternating drought and rewetting periods. Thereafter, soil samples were exposed to a gradient of Cu concentrations through a bioassay involving nitrification. The dose-response curves of PNA in function of added Cu were modeled to calculate the effective Cu concentrations, namely ECx with x being the percentage of PNA inhibition. These values were then compared between experimental conditions to highlight differences in threshold values. The preincubation moisture treatments significantly affected the PNA responses to the secondary Cu stress with, for instance, hormetic responses in all cases except for the dry-rewetting treatment. Small PNA inhibitions were estimated for high Cu doses in the soils with low water contents (30% WHC) or submitted to dry-rewetting cycles, contrarily to the patterns observed for the soils with high water contents (90% WHC) or submitted to a single period of drought. Overall, significant differences were found in estimated ECx values between moisture treatments.

No Evidence for Activity Adjustment in Response to Increased Density in Daphnia magna.

Increased population density may lead to a decrease in energy available for growth and reproduction via effects on the activity level of individuals. Whilst this may be of particular importance for organisms that compete for defendable resources and/or have a high frequency of social interactions, it is less obvious how individual activity should covary with population density when food resources are not defendable or direct interactions among individuals are negligible. Based on observations that there is a general negative relationship between population density and metabolism it has been suggested that organisms actively reduce activity under increased density to accommodate an expected decrease in food availability. However, in the absence of direct activity measurements the validity of this hypothesis is unclear. Here we test for such anticipatory adjustments of activity levels in the planktonic cladoceran Daphnia magna Straus, a filter feeder whose food resources are not defendable, meaning that density responses can be evaluated in the absence of direct interactions. We tested for changes in activity in response to two separate density cues, one being the direct physical and visual stimuli resulting from being in the vicinity of conspecifics ('direct density experiment'), and the other being the detection of olfactory cues in their environment ('olfactory cue experiment'). Ten genetically distinct clones were used to evaluate the potential for genetic variation in these responses. Our measures of activity were highly repeatable, and there was significant variation in activity among clones. Furthermore, this clonal variation was consistent in the 'direct density' and 'olfactory cue' experiments. The estimated evolvability of the trait (1.3-3.2%) was within the range typically observed in behavioural traits. However, there was no indication that the activity level of individuals respond to population density, either directly to actual density or to olfactory cues representing high density. In this case, the energetic influence of density on population dynamics is sufficiently described by effects on per capita resource availability.