Predicting dioxin-like PCBs soil contamination levels using milk of grazing animal as indicator

Dioxin-like PCBs (dl-PCBs) are ubiquitous persistent organic pollutants of recognized negative effects on human health. Assessing highly polluted areas should be an important public health issue. This study proposes to use the milk of grazing animals as a bioindicator of dl-PCB contamination in the environment. The hypothesis is that milk concentration of dl-PCBs are related to soil concentrations of these compounds, and that soils are generally reflective of a larger environmental issue of dl-PCB contamination. In this study, we evaluate the possibility of predicting soil concentrations using milk of sheep, cows and buffalos in a spatial model. For this purpose, samples of soil and milk collected in Campania (Italy) were introduced in a GIS platform to perform geostatistical analysis for building a simple predictive model. The ordinary least squares regressions (OLS) showed a statistically significant correlation (p < 0.05) between soil and milk contamination. However, this relationship was spatially variable. Thus, a geographically weighted regression (GWR) was performed, obtaining R² values of 0.91, 0.77 and 0.66 for sheep’s, buffalo’s and cow’s milk respectively. Assessed the mathematical relationships between the variables, new data was introduced to evaluate the performance of the model. Predictions of soil contamination with dl-PCBs using sheep’s, cow’s and buffalo’s milk showed a mean error of 23%, 25% and 36% respectively. According to these results the sheep’s milk can be considered the best bioindicator of dl-PCBs contamination among the three species. The results of this project evidence the potentialities of the proposed approach to assess bioindicator performance in a spatial predictive model.