Heavy Metal Soil Mobility & Plant Uptake Simulator

Contaminant & Soil

Poisonous metal

Soil pH 6.5

Organic matter 3.0%

Total soil contamination 120 mg/kg

Live Readouts

Bioavailable pore-water (Cw)— mg/L

Bioavailable fraction— %

Plant tissue conc. (Cplant)— mg/kg

HQ = 0.00 · below food-safety limit

Bioavailable ion (pore water) Bound ion (sorbed to soil) Absorbed into plant tissue

How it works

A poisonous heavy metal added to soil doesn't stay uniformly toxic — most of it binds to soil particles and organic matter, and only the dissolved fraction in the pore water is actually bioavailable to roots. The split is a linear sorption (distribution-coefficient) equilibrium:

Kd = Kd0 · 10^(k·(pH − 7)) · (1 + 0.15·OM%)   [L/kg]
Cw = Ctot / (Kd + θ)                          [mg/L, pore water]
Cs = Kd · Cw                                  [mg/kg, sorbed]
bioavailable % = Cw·θ / Ctot × 100

θ ≈ 0.3 L water per kg soil is a typical field moisture content. Kd rises with pH and organic matter for cationic metals (Cd, Pb, Zn, Cu) — acidic, mineral soils mobilize far more metal than neutral, humus-rich ones, which is exactly why acid rain and acidic mine drainage increase heavy-metal poisoning risk in real ecosystems.

Roots draw metal from the pore water in rough proportion to a metal-specific bioconcentration factor (BCF), giving the crop tissue concentration and a hazard quotient against a food-safety limit (MRL):

Cplant = BCF · Cw     HQ = Cplant / MRL   (HQ ≥ 1 → unsafe)

Metal — switches Kd0, the pH sensitivity, BCF and MRL to that element's real order-of-magnitude toxicology (Pb sorbs strongly and is poorly translocated; Cd is far more mobile and bioaccumulates readily).
pH / organic matter — raise either one and watch the glowing "bioavailable" ions in the soil turn brown (bound) as fewer of them reach the roots.
Total contamination — the total mass of metal added to the soil, mg per kg dry soil.
Glowing ions drift toward the nearest root and rise into the canopy when captured — a direct visual of the soil→root→shoot exposure pathway that environmental toxicologists model as the exposome.

Bioavailable Bound

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