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Research article1994Peer reviewed

The association between selenium and humic substances in forested ecosystems— laboratory evidence

Gustafsson, Jon Petter; Johnsson, Lars E.

Abstract

In the soils and aquatic systems of coniferous forests, selenium is usually associated with humic substances. To clarify further some of the mechanisms involved, labelled and unlabelled selenite were added to two forest floors and to a brown-water lake. Sequential extraction procedures and chromatographic methods were used to evaluate the resulting association between selenium and humic substances. It was observed that the forest floors fixed most of the added selenite by means of microbial reductive incorporation and that selenium was preferentially incorporated into low-molecular-weight fractions of the humic substances. By contrast, selenium reduction was much slower in the brown-water lake and instead, inorganic complexation of selenite to metal-humic complexes was important during the experiment, provided that the concentrations of competing ligands were low.

Keywords

SELENIUM; HUMIC SUBSTANCES; SOILS; AQUATIC SYSTEMS; CONIFEROUS FORESTS

Published in

Applied Organometallic Chemistry
1994, Volume: 8, number: 2, pages: 141-147
Publisher: JOHN WILEY & SONS LTD

        SLU Authors

      • Johnsson, Lars E.

        • Department of Soil Sciences, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

      UKÄ Subject classification

      Geochemistry

      Publication identifier

      DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/aoc.590080209

      Permanent link to this page (URI)

      https://res.slu.se/id/publ/69515