Abstract

Heavy metals are among the most suitable indicators for assessing pollution in soil and water resources due to their long-term persistence in the environment and toxic characteristics, which often pose significant challenges. The aim of this study was to investigate heavy metal contamination in soil across forest, rangeland, agricultural, and residential land uses in the Vaz watershed. For this purpose, 47 soil samples from all land uses and one riverbed sediment sample from the watershed outlet were collected. After drying, the samples were sieved through a 63-micron mesh and transferred to a laboratory for elemental concentration analysis using ICP-MS. The concentrations of chromium (Cr), manganese (Mn), iron (Fe), nickel (Ni), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), mercury (Hg), and lead (Pb) were analyzed. Contamination indices—including the contamination factor (CF), degree of contamination (Cd), modified degree of contamination (mCd), geo-accumulation index (Igeo), enrichment factor (EF), and ecological risk index (ERI)—were applied to evaluate sediment quality across different land uses. Results indicated that urban (residential) land use exhibited the highest values for both the contamination factor (CF) and geo-accumulation index (Igeo), followed by agricultural, forest, and rangeland land uses, respectively. Based on the degree of contamination (Cd), rangeland showed very low contamination, forest and agricultural land uses had moderate contamination, and residential land use displayed high contamination. However, the modified degree of contamination (mCd) revealed very low contamination levels for forest, rangeland, and agricultural land uses, and low contamination for residential areas.