UC Riverside

Food contamination is responsible for thousands of deaths worldwide every year. Plants represent the most common pathway for chemicals into the human and animal food chain. Although existing dynamic plant uptake models for chemicals are crucial for the development of reliable mitigation strategies for food pollution, they nevertheless simplify the description of physicochemical processes in soil and plants, mass transfer processes between soil and plants and in plants, and transformation in plants. To fill this scientific gap, we couple a widely used hydrological model (HYDRUS) with a multicompartment dynamic plant uptake model, which accounts for differentiated multiple metabolization pathways in plant's tissues. The developed model is validated first theoretically and then experimentally against measured data from an experiment on the translocation and transformation of carbamazepine in three vegetables. The analysis is further enriched by performing a global sensitivity analysis on the soil-plant model to identify factors driving the compound's accumulation in plants' shoots, as well as to elucidate the role and the importance of soil hydraulic properties on the plant uptake process. Results of the multilevel numerical analysis emphasize the model's flexibility and demonstrate its ability to accurately reproduce physicochemical processes involved in the dynamic plant uptake of chemicals from contaminated soils.