Ecological Consequences of Soil Contamination with Nitroaromatic Compounds

4 Ecological Consequences of Soil Contamination with Nitroaromatic Compounds 

The ecotoxicological data reviewed in this section show that TNT contamination of soil can disrupt the ecological functioning of a soil system and inhibit natural attenuation processes. This occurs because TNT can destroy a portion of the soil microbial community involved in OM decomposition and reduces the amount of soil Corg produced by this community. Consequently, the amount of bioavailable TNT is relatively high and it interferes with colonization of impacted areas by plants, resulting in toxicity of TNT to soil invertebrates and adversely affecting site remediation and 

As discussed earlier, nitroaromatic compounds introduced into soil can undergo rapid transformation to the amino-nitro intermediates. Frequent co-occurrence of TNT, TNB, DNTs, and ADNTs in soils of contaminated sites or in experimentally contaminated soil treatments precluded investigators from partitioning the effects of the parent materials and their transformation products on soil microorganisms [7,12,17], As a result, the established toxicity values for TNT reported in previous studies should not be accepted unequivocally. Additional studies will be required to definitively resolve the toxicity of individual nitroaromatic EMs to the soil microbial community and to critical processes in the soil ecosystem regulated by this community. 

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