Although separating bioavailability into three operational insights
(i.e., environmental availability, environmental bioavailability and
toxicological availability) allows to clarify the concept and to propose
various measurement methods, the underlying physical, chemical and
biological factors that ultimately govern the transfer of TE from a
contaminated habitat to living organisms are still poorly understood.
In particular the question remains to know the relationships between
environmental availability and environmental bioavailability and,
ultimately, how these descriptors should be handled in a view of environmental risk assessment. In this work, we studied the correlations
between TE extracted by standardized chemical methods and those
actually accumulated in two model organisms (plants and snails). We
also investigated the influence of soil properties and contamination
source on TE bioaccumulation.