HMCA-Contour: A Visual Basic Program Based on Surfer Automation for Soil Heavy Metal Spatial Distribution and Contamination Assessment Mapping

Abstract

Soil heavy metal contamination has become a major concern in many parts of the world. Grasping the spatial distribution patterns of heavy metals and evaluating soil heavy metal contamination are of great significance to policy makers for land use planning and pollution identification. However, these processes usually involve repetitive calculation and plotting, which are time-consuming and laborious, especially in a geochemical survey. In this paper, HMCA-Contour, which is a program written in Visual Basic based on Surfer 13.0, has been designed to simplify the pollution indices recalculation and plotting routines. This software is comprised of three functions, i.e., data processing, plotting, and template setting. With user-friendly interfaces, the user can easily and efficiently calculate pollution indices and generate batch publication-quality maps of heavy metal spatial distribution and pollution levels. To demonstrate the advantage of HMCA-Contour, a case study from the Gaerqin Mine area is used in this paper. HMCA-Contour, as a brand new software, is promising and will become a useful tool for environmental management.