The study of relationships between the elemental compositions of soil–plant conjugated media and the role of each element in the life cycle of plants is necessary to describe and assess the safety of natural and technogenic ecosystems, food products, and herbal medicinal raw materials. In soils and plants, the content of organic matter and rock-forming elements varies from fractions to dozens of percent, and trace amounts of other chemical elements are also present. The sample preparation of substances of various compositions based on dry ashing, acid digestion, or fusion limits the list of analytes and complicates their simultaneous determination over wide concentration ranges. Therefore, a procedure for the direct simultaneous determination of 24 essential and toxic elements in conjugated media by direct current arc discharge atomic emission spectrometry without any substance mineralization was proposed using uniform calibrations in the ranges from 0.0 to n × 106 μg/g was proposed. The traceability of the results to the international soil- and plant-matrix certified reference materials made in Russia, China, and Mongolia is shown. The accumulation profiles of trace elements by woody and herbaceous plants growing on soils of the Ulaanbaatar city with varying degrees of anthropogenic impact have been compiled based on the new data obtained.
Vasil’eva et al. (Sun,) studied this question.