Elemental inheritance evaluation for geochemical elements in soil of the Daliangshan, China

Abstract

The inheritance and migration characters of different elements in the soil profile can serve agriculture, environmental protection, mineral exploration, and other related research fields. These characters are mainly determined by the various geochemical behaviors of different elements. However, the elemental behaviors for the same element might be varied wildly due to various physical, chemical, and biological environments in local places. Because the transformation of rock to soil includes rock-weathering and pedogenic processes. Here, we propose a framework for evaluating the elemental inheritance and migration characters from the underlying rocks or C horizons during rock-weathering and pedogenic processes in local places. In this framework, random forest regression was used to evaluate the importance of controlling factors, i.e., parent material or rock, climate, vegetation, and topography, for individual elements during both processes. Further hierarchical clustering analysis was used to group elements into three inheritance categories according to their controlling factors. The framework was then used in the Daliangshan area. At last, we give some suggestions on the assessment of mineral resources, environment, and agriculture according to the elemental inheritance categories in the Daliangshan area. The methodological approach can be transferred to other local places. Thematic collection: This article is part of the Applications of Innovations in Geochemical Data Analysis collection available at: https://www.lyellcollection.org/topic/collections/applications-of-innovations-in-geochemical-data-analysis Supplementary material: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6274063