Use of soil properties and major element composition to predict background levels of trace elements in soils

The usefulness of various soil parameters to predict naturally occurring levels of some metallic trace elements (MTE) in soils has been studied for some agricultural and forest soils of Southern Belgium. The driving factors of the content in Cu, Ni, Pb, and Zn were investigated through multi-scale comparisons. This paper deals with multivariate and regression analysis of the results.