Imposed by urbanization on soil heavy metal content of lake wetland and evaluation of ecological risks in East Dongting Lake

The properties of heavy metals in soil hold key to effectively protecting the urban ecosystem and predicting the environmental risks. In this study, we selected the wetland of East Dongting Lake as the study area, and measured the contents of their physicochemical properties. We adopted the methods of multivariate statistical analysis and inverse distance weighted (IDW) interpolation, so as to reveal the sources and distribution characteristics of heavy metal content in soil in the study area. By adopting the potential ecological risk index (PERI) method, we assessed the PERI values of heavy metals. The research findings indicate that: (1) As shown by the analysis of correlation matrix, the elements of As, Hg and Zn are positively correlated with SOC (P