Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess (2005) 19: 292–300
DOI 10.1007/s00477-005-0233-9
O R I GI N A L P A P E R
Nazzareno Diodato Æ Michele Ceccarelli
Environinformatics in ecological risk assessment
of agroecosystems pollutant leaching
Published online: 5 April 2005

Springer-Verlag 2005
Abstract In this paper, a novel approach for mapping
leaching risk at large sub-regional scale under limited
information is presented, with acronym environinfor-
matics in ecological risk assessment. The problem con-
sists into quantifying the exchange frequency of the
plant available soil water (Narula et al. in J Geogr In-
form Decision Anal 7(1)32–46, 2002), this frequency can
be adopted as a measure indicating the nutrient and
contaminant leaching risk for a site. Our approach is
based on integrating soil water balance with spatial
analysis tools. However, any decision involved in sci-
entific risk evaluation requires the accurate quantifica-
tion of the degree of uncertainty arising from sampling,
modelling and interpolation errors. The non-parametric
geostatistical procedure of Indicator Kriging enables to
circumvent this problem by estimating the probability
that the true value exceed a set of threshold values. The
transformation of leaching data to a binary response
variable, known as ‘‘indicator’’, can lead to a soft
description of leaching. Such soft description can miti-
gate the uncertainty in exchange frequency estimates of
the plant available soil water. The approach was applied
to a test site in Beneventan agroecosystem (South Italy)
by using a long-term hydrological water balance ac-
quired in a 40-years period. In this way, about 400 km2
(25%) of the total 2,000 km2 of the Benevento province
were classified as areas sensitive to nutrient and con-
taminant leaching.
N. Diodato (&)
Monte Pino Research Observatory on Climate
and Landscape (Italy),
GTOS\TEMS Network–Terrestrial
Ecosystem Monitoring Sites (FAO–United Nations),
82100 Benevento, Italy
E-mail: nazdiod@tin.it
URL: http://www.fao.org/gtos/tems
M. Ceccarelli
Research Center on Software Technologies-RCOST,
University of Sannio, via Port’Arsa, 11,
82100 Benevento, Italy
Keywords Soil-water-balance Æ Pollutant leaching Æ
Geostatistics Æ Probability maps Æ Risk assessment Æ
Southern Italy
Introduction
In some environmental conditions which occur in wet
periods of the year, water surplus is the most impor-
tant hydrological reservoir, especially in agricultural
lands. However, in this context, water can be consid-
ered both a resource and a disturbance factor for ag-
roecosystems, because some nutrient pollution that
enter the water in a diffuse manner are carried mostly
from rainfall events. Then, contamination of water-
courses can seriously disturb aquatic eco-systems and
may then contaminate drinking water supplies. As re-
ferred by Wit et al. (2002), the principal cause of
agricultural nutrient pollution in Europe is the input of
nutrients to agricultural land (fertilisers and manure)
exceeding the output of nutrients from agricultural
land (crop yield).
Water resource quality is a useful descriptor of agri-
cultural sustainability during the planning stage (Smith
and McDonald 1998), and a defensible indicator of
sustainable land management (Ochola and Kerkides
2003). Greater emphasis is being placed on the use of
process-based mathematical models for the prediction of
contaminant transport and to evaluate the risk
of leaching and groundwater quality (Klimas 1996;
Wingle et al. 1999; Alapati and Kabala 2000; Cepuder
and Schmitten 2000; Violette et al. 2000; Dubus and
Janssen 2003; Matjı́ek et al. 2003; Bellin et al. 2004;
Kunkel et al. 2004). A comprehensive description of
approaches to flow and contaminant transport modeling
used for the environmental risk assessment can be found
in Chilès and de Marsily (1993), and Dubus et al. (2002).
Depending on the amount of information available
to the modeller, primary data might include site char-
acteristics (e.g. longitude, latitude, elevation), soil