Landner L. (ed.) Speciation of Metals in Water, Sediment and Soil Systems

Proceedings of an International Workshop, Sunne, October 15–16, 1986. — Springer, 1987. — 189 p. — (Lecture Notes in Earth Sciences — vol. 11).It is to-day generally recognized by environmental scientists that the particular behaviour of trace metals in the environment is determined by their specific physico-chemical forms rather than by their total concentration. With the introduction, several years ago, of atomic absorption spectrometry at many laboratories involved in environmental studies, a technique for simple, rapid and cheap determination of total metal concentrations in environmental samples became available. As a consequence, there is a plethora of scientific papers and reports where metal concentrations in the environment are only reported as total concentrations.
It appears that the simplicity of making accurate determinations of total metal contents in water, sediment and biological samples has somewhat masked the need for improved knowledge about the various forms of metals occurring in the environment as well as the bioavailahility of these forms. In other words, the need for metal speciation in studies of metals in the environment does not seem to have become obvious to most environmental scientists until relatively recently. As a matter of fact, it was only in the middle of the 1970s that the first systematic attempts were made to obtain information about the various metal species occurring in environmental samples.