Establishing local background values for evaluating potentially toxic element risk in semi-arid Moroccan agricultural soils

Accurate assessment of potentially toxic element (PTE) risk in agricultural soils requires distinguishing natural geochemical variability from anthropogenic contamination through locally derived background values (SGB). This study established SGB for eight PTEs (As, Ba, Cd, Cu, Mn, Pb, Sr, Zn) across three semi-arid Moroccan regions using five statistical methods, evaluated pollution risk using contamination factor (CF) and geo-accumulation index (Igeo), and examined soil quality’s role in conta