Co-contamination of antibiotics and metals in peri-urban agricultural soils and source identification

To identify the dominant sources of contamination in peri-urban land, this study investigated the concentrations and distributions of antibiotics and metals in agricultural soil of this area. An index of landscape development intensity (LDI) was used to characterize the distribution of human disturbance-related land use. The results showed that total antibiotic concentration in the soil reached 395.55 μg/kg and that chlortetracycline was the predominant antibiotic compound, with a relatively high mean concentration of 30.62 μg/kg. In soils, the mean concentrations of Cu, Zn, and Pb were 38.41, 127.88, and 56.61 mg/kg and those of Al, Fe, and K were 83.73, 24.17, and 23.42 g/kg, respectively. A redundancy analysis showed that the landscape pattern in a 300-m buffer zone can well explain the variation in the concentrations of antibiotics and metals (24%, p < 0.05). The LDI in the 300-m buffer zone significantly correlated with the concentrations of total antibiotics and total amounts of Cu and Zn in the soil, suggesting that the risk of soil contamination increases with the intensity of anthropogenic activities. A structural equation modeling analysis indicated that Al, Cu, and Zn could significantly aggravate accumulation of tetracycline antibiotics in the soil, whereas there were only significantly direct paths from Cu to ciprofloxacin and norfloxacin. Overall, the results showed that aggravated co-contamination of antibiotics and metals occurs in agricultural soil under intensive human disturbance.