Enrico Dinelli

University of Bologna | UNIBO · Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences BiGeA

The mineralogical and chemical variations of ochreous precipitates forming from acid sulphate waters discharged from the lowest mine adit (‘‘Sf. Cruci din Orlea’’) of the Rosia Montana Gold Mine (Romania) were investigated by a multianalytical approach (XRPD, IR, TEM, ICP) applied to surface precipitates and associated waters. The mineralogy of the...

About a century ago, B was recognised as an essential element for the normal growth of plants and terrestrial organisms. Limitations for plant development have been recognised in agricultural systems, particularly in highly weathered soil. Boron is rarely analysed in whole rock or soil analysis, as it requires specific analytical techniques. It is...

Groundwater is a vital source of freshwater, serving ecological, environmental, and societal needs. In regions with springs as a predominant source, such as the Northern Apennines (Italy), resilience of these springs to climate-induced recharge changes is crucial for water supply and ecosystem preservation. In this study, Nadìa Spring in the Northe...

Introduction: Municipal Solid Waste Incineration (MSWI) plants generate significant amounts of solid end-products, such as bottom ash (BA), containing potentially toxic elements like Cr, Ni, As, Cd, and Pb, base elements (e.g., Si, Al, Fe, Ti, Cu, and Zn), and other technology-critical elements (TCE), such as Co, Ga, Mg, Nb, P, Sb, Sc, V, Li, Sr, a...

This study was conducted in the Middle Branch of Bue Marino Cave (Sardinia, Italy) to reconstruct paleoecological conditions during the Holocene through microfaunal proxies in seven surface sediment samples and a short sediment core (BMD-2018, 18 cm), all collected in 2018 and another core sampled in 2021 (BMD-2021, 28 cm). The first attempt at dat...

Introduction: Bottom ash (BA) constitutes a significant by-product obtained during the incineration of municipal solid waste in waste-to-energy (WtE) plants. BA is a heterogeneous material made of different fractions, glass, minerals, metals, and unburned residual organic matter. Due to the non-hazardous nature of the unburned material, BA can be e...

Anthropogenic trace metal contamination has significantly increased and has caused many hazardous consequences for the ecosystems and human health. The Terni basin valley (Central Italy) shows a heavy load of pollutants from industrial activities, while the characteristic orography structure of the valley favours air stagnation, thus limiting air p...

Introduction: Bottom ashes (BA) from municipal solid waste incinerators (MSWIs) are currently classified by the European Waste Catalogue as industrial non-hazardous waste. To promote their reuse, identification and characterization of the heavy metal-bearing phases (both glass and minerals), as well as their weathering behavior, must be addressed f...

In the last three decades, benthic foraminiferal ecology has been intensively investigated to improve the potential application of these marine organisms as proxies of the effects of climate change and other global change phenomena. It is still challenging to define the most important factors affecting foraminiferal communities and derived faunisti...

Mine exploitations worldwide have generated a great amount of tailings, which still contain large quantities of Potentially Harmful Elements (PHEs) able to contaminate soil, water, air, wildlife, and the food chain. Phytoremediation is an option to immobilize and/or extract PHEs from polluted mining areas. This study aims at assessing the phytoreme...

The Po-Adriatic region offers an excellent case for reconstructing sediment provenance and transport pathways of a multi-sourced sediment-routing system. Through a comprehensive set of ∼1400 geochemical data, a model for provenance and sediment flux was built based on distinct compositional fingerprints of 53 fluvial systems and their comparison to...

Having an accurate and easily accessible geochemical database is crucial for a correct groundwater management. Here, for the first time in Italy, chemico-physical data of groundwater collected by different Environmental Protection Agencies during the 2018 were integrated into a single database to assess the geochemical status of a wide and complex...

The contamination of agricultural soil with potentially toxic elements (PTEs) such as cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), chromium (Cr), zinc (Zn), nickel (Ni), and copper (Cu) persists and intensifies in food crops posing a risk to human health. When used as effective soil manures, biomass conversion to organic amendments can help to deal with this deteriora...

The Nadìa spring is the second largest tapped spring in the Emilia Romagna Region (northern Italy), representing a strategic local source of drinking water, also in the perspective of future global changes. The spring flowrate ranges between 65 l/s in the recharge season and 45 l/s at the end of the low-flow season, when most of the other tapped sp...

The effect of land use on sediment quality depends on the spatial scale. It has been found that not only the type of land use but also the landscape characteristics has a significant impact on water quality ecosystem services provided by riparian zones including filtration of sediments and pollutants. In the present study, principal component analy...

Abandoned mining wastes are both an environmental challenge and a possible secondary raw material source. The characterization and monitoring of these sites are often expensive and cumbersome because of the need of repeated field surveys. Remote sensing data are a cost-effective alternative that helps in producing multiscale maps of mining wastes....

The inter-element relationships and the forms in which metals exist strongly influence their mobility and, in turn, have a signature on the environment and human health. Located in the northern Apennines within the Emilia-Romagna region, the Ridracoli artificial lake is one of Italy's most important reservoirs that provides drinking water for about...

Agricultural soil (Ap-horizon, 0–20 cm) samples were collected from 33 European countries as part of the GEMAS (GEochemical Mapping of Agricultural and grazing land Soil) soilmapping project. The Mg data derived from total concentrations (XRF) and two acid digestion methods, aqua regia (AR) and Mobile Metal Ion (MMI®), were used to provide an overv...

The Sicily Channel is an NW–SE trending area characterized by three primary tectonic depressions (i.e., Pantelleria, Linosa, and Malta basins). Five gravity cores collected in these basins were studied. Through geochemical analyses, the main elements characterizing the sampled sediments were recognized. The normalized values of Ti and K allowed ide...

Valle Mandriole is one of the two last remaining freshwater wetlands in the coastal area of Ravenna (NE Italy). In 2011, a management technique that involves the complete drainage of the southern portion of Valle Mandriole during summer has been undertaken. In the present study, the effects of this artificial drying on the benthic macroinvertebrate...

The project Geochemical Mapping of Agricultural and grazing land Soil (GEMAS) was carried out in 33 European countries (5.6 million km2) with an average sampling density of 1 site per 2500 km2. The main objective was to assess the chemical quality of productive soils. All collected soil samples were prepared in the same laboratory, and subsequently...

Ridracoli and Conca are both Reservoirs for the storage of drinking water in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy but they differ in many ways. The Ridracoli reservoir is located upstream near the source on Apennines, it can store 33.06·106 m3 of water and shows the formation of a seasonal anoxic layer on the bottom in late summer (Toller et al., 202...

The fan shell Pinna nobilis is the largest bivalve endemic to the Mediterranean and is actually a strongly endangered species. Due to the biological, ecological, and historical relevance of this species, the research of a non-lethal method to relate the element content in organism’s tissues and environment can provide information potentially useful...

The concept of natural background level (NBL) aims at distinguishing the natural and anthropogenic contributions to concentrations of specific contaminants, as groundwater management and protection tools. This is usually defined as a unique value at a regional scale, even when the hydrogeological and geochemical features of a certain territory are...

Selenium contamination of air, aquatic environments, soils and sediments is a serious environmental concern of increasing importance. Selenium has a paradoxical feature in bringing about health benefits under the prescribed level, but only a few fold increase in its concentration causes deleterious effects to flora and fauna, humans and the environ...

Research on selenium has increased in recent years due to its extensive use in electronic applications, solar cells, glass industry, photocopying, cosmetic industry, and as a dietary supplement. New data and discoveries on the importance of this metalloid in the fields of medical biotechnology and human health have further increased its commercial...

Sediment characterization of Ridracoli reservoir, an artificial lake for water supply, and surroundings of the Fiumi Uniti catchment in the northern Apennines, Emilia-Romagna, Italy, is carried out to evaluate the overall status of the drainage basin encompassing the reservoir. The study area combines the reservoir catchment that is part of the For...

The generation of self-protective mine-wastes through a superficial secondary layer to prohibit the leaching of toxic elements can be a new perspective for future environmental studies. The bioleaching-based treatment can lead to the surface passivation of contaminated minerals, which inhibit trace elements mobility. In this work, the electrochemic...

Analisi delle caratteristiche fisico-chimiche e composizionali di acque e sedimenti di un invaso artificiale, con particolare riguardo al caso del Lago di Ridracoli, un grande lago artificiale nella provincia di Forlì-Cesena sugli Appennini gestito da Romagna Acque Società delle Fonti S.p.a. che immagazzina acqua potabile per l'Acquedotto della Rom...

This paper aims to compare two foraminiferal based biotic indices generally used to evaluate the ecological quality status (EcoQS): the Foram-AMBI and the Foram Stress Index (FSI). For this purpose, we report the distribution and diversity of living foraminiferal assemblages and the environmental variables from a bathymetric transect in the Souther...

Arsenic is found in groundwater above regulatory limits in many countries and its origin is often from natural sources, making the definition of Natural Background Levels (NBLs) crucial. NBL is commonly assessed based on either dedicated small-scale monitoring campaigns or large-scale national/regional groundwater monitoring networks that may not g...

Coastal lagoons are complex environments threatened by natural and anthropogenic stressors. Here, we tested the effectiveness of combining physical, geochemical and chemical measurements with biomarker data obtained in field-exposed marine mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis) as a biomonitoring strategy for a highly pressured lagoon (Pialassa Baiona...

Sediments represent a critical compartment of marine coastal ecosystems due to the toxic and long-lasting effects of the contaminants buried therein. Here, we investigated the properties of surficial sediments in front of the Southern Marche Region coast (Central Adriatic Sea, Italy). The grain size of the surficial sediments was determined by X-ra...

Agricultural soil (Ap-horizon, 0–20 cm) samples were collected from 33 European countries as part of the GEMAS (GEochemical Mapping of Agricultural and grazing land Soil) soilmapping project. The Mg data derived from total concentrations (XRF) and two acid digestion methods, aqua regia (AR) and Mobile Metal Ion (MMI® ), were used to provide an over...

The study reports the results of a geochemical survey in a coastal area of northern Italy with focus on the distribution of chemical elements in near surface sediments as result of both sediment origin and anthropogenic activities. In addition to emphasizing the source-to-sink element dynamics in the area, the main purpose of this paper is to ascer...

Elevated concentrations of trace elements represent a major concern to wetland ecosystems, since river estuaries are geochemical endpoints that accumulate pollution. Although the negative impact of environmental exposure of highly toxic elements such as Pb and Hg has received substantial attention, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the...

The present paper describes the assessment of the atmospheric deposition processes in a basin valley through a multidisciplinary approach based on the data collected within an extensive chemical-physical characterization of the soils, combined with the local meteorology. Surface soil cores were collected on a NNW-SSE transect across the Terni basin...

This study focused on the geochemical and sedimentological characterization of recent sediments from two marine sites (S1 and E1) located in the North Adriatic Sea, between the Po River prodelta and the Rimini coast. Major and trace metal concentrations reflect the drainage area of the Po River and its tributaries, considered one of the most pollut...

Hydrogeochemical analyses were carried out to identify geochemical processes occurring in the low-lying coastal aquifer of Ravenna, North Adriatic Sea (Italy). The area is characterized by a complex coexistence of several environments: coastal dunes, paleodunes, pine forests, freshwater wetlands, rivers, brackish lagoons, gravel pit lakes, reclaime...

The discharge of toxic elements from tailings soils in the aquatic environments occurs chiefly in the presence of indigenous bacteria. The biotic components may interact in the opposite direction, leading to the formation of a passivation layer, which can inhibit the solubility of the elements. In this work, the influence of jarosite on the bio-imm...

Sediment samples were collected in 2019 from Fiumi Uniti catchment in Italy in an area between the Romagna Apennines and the Adriatic Sea. The sampling phase included the collection of sediments from the Ridracoli reservoir, a large artificial basin located at 480 m a.s.l. made by construction of a dam on the Bidente river and used as the main drin...

This paper reports supplementary information to “Understanding room-temperature magnetic properties of anthropogenic ashes from municipal solid waste incineration to assess potential impacts and resources” [1]. The sample-set is composed of 47 samples of bottom (BA) and fly (FA) ashes from Municipal Solid Waste Incineration (MSWI), including eight...

Metal recovery from wastes is essential for a circular economy and minimising present-day society environmental footprint. In this study, we combined electrodialysis with bioleaching of fly ashes for enhanced metal recovery from municipal solid waste incineration residues. Results showed that the use of low-level direct current with acidophilic bac...

Environmental magnetic studies are widely used to trace sources of anthropogenic pollution and have revealed promising applications to the urban waste management system. Here, a collection of solid samples from Municipal Solid Waste Incinerators (MSWI) were studied to probe the capability of geochemical and magnetic data integration as a tool for a...

The Ridracoli artificial basin is the main water reservoir of the Emilia-Romagna region (Northeast Italy). The reservoir was made by construction of a dam on the Bidente River in 1982. It is used as the main drinking water supply of the region and for hydropower production. The physical and chemical parameterseters (temperature, pH, electrical cond...

This study investigates for the first time the integrity of multiple stacked aquitards with different degrees of contaminant degradation. Aquitard integrity was assessed in a contaminated, multi-layered, alluvial aquifer-aquitard system (Ferrara, northern Italy). The system was contaminated by mixed organic contaminants of industrial origin (mostly...

This paper presents a route for the treatment of MSWI fly (FA) and bottom ashes (BA) using microorganisms to critically assess whether bioleaching is within reach of effective industrial application. The leaching of metals from BA and FA was investigated in a controlled laboratory environment using a culture isolated from a natural system where the...

The demand for ‘high-tech’ element resources (e.g., rare earth elements, lithium, platinum group elements) has increased with their continued consumption in developed countries and the emergence of developing economies. To provide a sound knowledge base for future generations, it is necessary to identify the spatial distribution of critical element...

This study is the first attempt to evaluate occurrence, distribution and potential health impacts of As at a national scale in Italy. In various environmental matrices, As geochemical distribution was investigated and carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic risks were assessed with respect to different exposure routes and age groups. Both deterministic a...

Here we present the preliminary results of the project “SuoliBo-HD: high density magnetic monitoring of urban topsoils from the Bologna municipality” which has the objective of evaluating the anthropic impacts in the urban area using a combination of geochemical and magnetic methods. We collected 70 samples of topsoil (up to 20 cm depth) from the p...

The continuous presence of toxic elements in the aquatic environments around mine tailings occurs due to bioleaching or chemical extraction promoted by the mining operations. Biogenic passivation treatment of tailings dams can be a new environment-friendly technique to inhibit the solubility of heavy metals. In spite of current bioleaching research...

Total organic carbon (TOC) contents in agricultural soil are presently receiving increased attention, not only because of their relationship to soil fertility, but also due to the sequestration of organic carbon in soil to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. In this research, the spatial patterns of TOC and its relationship with pH at the European sca...

Though clinothem geometry represents a key control on fluid flow in reservoir modeling, tracing clinothem boundaries accurately is commonly limited by the lack of sufficiently precise outcrop or subsurface data. This study shows that in basin systems with strongly heterogeneous compositional signatures, the combination of bulk‐sediment geochemistry...

Agglutinated foraminifera from surface sediments of two sites (S1 and E1) in the North Adriatic Sea were in- vestigated in order to detect their test composition and to explore possible links with the surrounding en- vironment. Chemical-mineralogical analyses of the agglutinated tests by scanning Electron Microscopy and Energy Dispersive Spectrosco...

Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) is one of the most important sources of pollution in fluvial systems and can enrich rivers in dissolved and suspended metals of environmental concern. Colloidal particles may favour the transport of metals to the sea, where metals can be accumulated in bottom sediments. The aim of this paper was to evaluate the mobility of...

In the last decades, the contamination by metals from mining areas, especially that due to Acid Mine Drainage (AMD), has become a hot topic for the scientific community. The precipitation of secondary minerals related to AMD is the most important natural method of scavenging elements from such solutions. These minerals are a dynamic system, in whic...

GEochemical Mapping of Agricultural Soils (GEMAS) is a cooperation project between the Geochemistry Expert Group of EuroGeoSurveys (EGS) and Eurometaux. The GEMAS project aim was to produce soil geochemical data at the continental-scale consistent with the EU regulation REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals). All GEMAS proj...

PURPOSE There is a need for an efficient technology that overcomes environmental and financial constraints associated with massive production of solid incineration end-products, i.e., fly ash (FA) and bottom ash (BA) from Municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI). Therefore, a bio-assisted approach has been tested using different experimental setup...

Agricultural soil (Ap-horizon, 0–20 cm) samples were collected in Europe (33 countries, 5.6 million km2) as part of the GEMAS (GEochemical Mapping of Agricultural and grazing land Soil) soil-mapping project. The GEMAS survey area includes diverse groups of soil parent materials with varying geological history, a wide range of climate zones, and la...

Sediments from the Pialassa Piomboni coastal lagoon (NE Italy) were studied to assess the degree of contamination and ecological risk related to trace metals by combining a geochemical characterization of bulk sediments with the assessment of the bioavailable forms of trace metals. With this purpose, sediment contamination (Cd, Cu, Hg, Ni, Pb, and...

The study aimed to assess the occurrence and partitioning of estrogens (ß-estradiol, E2; estrone, E1; 17α-ethinylestradiol, EE2), phenolic compounds (nonylphenol, NP; octylphenol, OP; bisphenol A, BPA) and perfluorinated compounds (perfluorooctanoic acid, PFOA; perfluorooctane sulfonate, PFOS) in waters and sediments of the main rivers and the coas...

This study demonstrates the use of digital image processing for the spatial pattern recognition and characterisation of Ni concentrations in topsoil in Europe. Moving average smoothing was applied to the TIN-interpolated grid model to suppress small irregularities. Digital image processing was applied then to the grid. Several NE-SW, E-W and NW-SE...

The GEMAS (geochemical mapping of agricultural soil) project collected 2108 Ap horizon soil samples from regularly ploughed fields in 33 European countries, covering 5.6 million km2. The <2 mm fraction of these samples was analysed for 53 elements by ICP-MS and ICP-AES, following a HNO3/HCl/H2O (modified aqua regia) digestion. Results are used here...

During their production, management, and landfilling, bottom (BA) and fly (FA) ashes from municipal solid waste incineration may liberate Fe-bearing, ultrafine particles and easily enter different environmental sinks of the biosphere. We aim to explore a collection of BA and FA samples from Italian incinerators to probe magnetic mineralogy and the...

Over the past two decades, illegal poaching of vertebrate fossils from the well-known Cretaceous exposures in Mongolia's Gobi Desert has reached epidemic proportions. Following recent efforts led by the Mongolian government to stem the flow of illegal fossils on the black-market, numerous important specimens have now been seized from private collec...