MITIGATING UPTAKE OF PER- AND POLYFLUOROALKYL SUBSTANCES BY CROPS USING SOIL AMENDMENTS

Our overarching goal is to develop pragmatic management practices that can immobilize per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in soils and decrease their bioavailability to plant uptake in order to mitigate their accumulation in agricultural produce. Irrigation with PFASs-contaminated water introduces PFASs into soils, transport with water to plant root zone, and accumulate in agricultural crops grown in the soils. We propose to elucidate the fate and transport of PFASs in soil-water-plant systems, and investigate the feasibility to interfere with the transport of PFASs to food crops using sorbent amendments. Although previous studies have investigated sorption and transport of PFASs in soils and plant uptake, little has been done to develop mitigation strategy to use sorbent amendments to mitigatePFASs bioavailability for plant uptake from soils. Our central hypothesis is that soil pore water is the major carrier by which PFASs are moved from soil to plant root zones. Sorbent amendments could effectively immobilize PFASs in soils and reduce their bioavailable fractions to plant uptake. To test the hypotheses and achieve our overall research goal, we propose the following three integrated specific objectives:(1) evaluate PFASs sorption, transport and immobilization in soils amended with layered double hydroxides (LDH) and Al-, Fe-modified biochars.(2) determine the bioavailability of PFASs to plant uptake from soils amended with LDH and modified biochars.(3) validate the to-be-developed management to mitigate the accumulation of PFASs in field crops.The knowledge to be gained could guide the development of science-based best management practices to abate the accumulation of PFASs in agricultural produce at the initial farming production stage via immobilizing PFASs in soils.