Abstract:Soil, crop and residents’ hair over Xiaoqinling gold mining region, China, which was selected as a case study, were sampled and analyzed for Hg, Cd, Pb, Cu, Cr, As and Zn concentrations. The concentrations of heavy metals in soil or crop and hair samples were used to assess their potential ecological risks, or to find the responses to these metals as evidences to prove the potential risk was coming down to observed harm, respectively. The results showed that, these metals in soil were ranked by severity of ecological risk as Hg＞Cd＞Pb＞Cu＞Cr＞As＞Zn, based on their single-element indexes. In the view of the potential ecological risk indexes, of all soil samples, about half had significantly high or high potential ecological risk, which covered more than 74% of the studied region. Most of the risks were 97.41% from Hg, Pb and Cd, especially, 84.37% from Hg. Both the single-element and potential ecological risk indexes indicated that, the ecological risk grades had a special spatial characteristic, and increased from northwest to southeast generally. This was agreed with the spatial distribution of the strength in gold mining activities over the studied region. The concentrations of Hg and Pb were higher than their relative backgrounds in the corps, and were even 9.48 and 25.09 times higher than their relative backgrounds in residents’ hair, respectively. All these showed that the heavy metals in the soil had a high potential ecological risk, especially, had been affecting these crops’ growing and yield, and even the residents’ health through food strains. Obviously, these metals’ potential ecological harm had been coming down to observed harm to the ecology.

Key words: gold mining activity; soil pollution; heavy metal; potential ecological risk