Dominant environmental factors influencing soil metal concentrations of Poyang Lake wetland, China: Soil property, topography, plant species and wetland type

Abstract Although an important sink for contaminants including metals, wetland soils can release metals and thus cause a secondary pollution when environmental condition changes. Metals in wetland soils are influenced by a variety of environmental factors, including soil property, topography, wetland type, and plant species. However, the degree of importance of these environmental factors to wetland soil metals has not yet been clearly explained. In this study, the effect of these environmental factors on soil metal concentrations (i.e., Cr, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Cd, and Pb) was explored in Poyang Lake wetland. Correlation, redundancy, and variance decomposition analyses were employed. The results indicate that the concentrations of Cu, Pb, Cd, Cr, and Zn were higher than their background values. Statistical analysis showed that all environmental factors explained 55.90% of the total variance (either p