Geertje Johanna Pronk

KWR Water Research Institute

Our understanding of the interactions between minerals, organic matter, and microorganisms at so-called biogeochemical interfaces in soil is still hampered by the inherent complexity of these systems. Artificial soil maturation experiments can help to bridge a gap in complexity between simple abiotic sorption experiments and larger-scale field expe...

Soils represent a very complex material where mineral, organic and biological components interact together to form a large ‘biogeochemical interface’. In order to study this complex interface in a simplified system, a so-called ‘artificial soil’ incubation experiment was carried out. This experiment was used here specifically to study the e...

To characterize biogeochemical interface properties in soil with respect to oxide surfaces, the contribution of weakly crystalline and crystalline oxides to soil specific surface area (SSA) of particle size fractions was determined. Three arable topsoils with intermediate to high clay content were subjected to ultrasonic dispersion and particle siz...

Effect-based methods (EBM) have great potential for water quality monitoring as they can detect the mixture effects of all active known and unknown chemicals in a sample, which cannot be addressed by chemical analysis alone. To date, EBM have primarily been applied in a research context, with a lower level of uptake by the water sector and regulato...

Over the past decade, effect-based methods (EBMs) have been increasingly applied for water quality monitoring. Despite being recommended as a monitoring tool in several guideline documents, EBMs' use remains limited to research projects. This study aimed to review the bioanalytical data published from studies conducted on wastewater, drinking water...

Water reuse has the potential to substantially reduce the demand on groundwater and surface water. This study presents a method to evaluate the potential of water reuse schemes in a regional context and demonstrates how water reuse propagates through the water system and potentially reduces pressure on groundwater resources. The use of Sankey diagr...

Nutrient turnover in soils is strongly driven by soil properties, including clay mineral composition. One main nutrient is phosphorus (P), which is known to be easily immobilized in soil. Therefore, the specific surface characteristics of clay minerals might substantially influence P availability in soil and thus the microbial strategies for access...

Petroleum hydrocarbon (PHC) contamination is a global environmental issue. Understanding the key factors and mechanisms controlling the fate and mobility of PHCs in soils and aquifers is critical for environmental risk assessment, the development of remediation strategies, and policy decisions. This study focuses on the effects of soil composition...

Water table fluctuations generate temporally and spatially dynamic physicochemical conditions that drive biogeochemical hot spots and hot moments in the vadose zone. However, their role in the cycling of soil C remains poorly known. Here, we present results from unvegetated column experiments filled with 45 cm of artificial soil containing 10% humu...

Soil microorganisms are frequently attached to mineral surfaces or organo-mineral complexes, yet little is known about the microbial colonization of different soil minerals. The use of artificial soils that differ only in their mineral composition (illite, montmorillonite, ferrihydrite, boehmite) and the presence of charcoal, but not in soil textur...

The characterization of the quality and storage capacity of geological underground reservoirs is one of the most important and challenging tasks for the realization of carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects. One approach for such an evaluation is the upscaling of data sets achieved by laboratory CO2 batch experiments to field scale. (Sub)-micros...

Microbial residues are important contributors to soil organic matter (SOM). However, the effect of mineral composition on microbial activity and thereby SOM development is not well understood. Here, we used artificial soils composed of four different mixtures containing illite, montmorillonite, ferrihydrite and charcoal to study the effect of miner...

Clay minerals, charcoal and metal oxides are essential parts of the soil matrix and strongly influence the formation of biogeochemical interfaces in soil. We investigated the role of these parental materials for the development of functional microbial guilds using the example of alkane-degrading bacteria harbouring the alkane monooxygenase gene (al...

The study of interactions between minerals, organic matter (OM) and microorganisms is essential for the understanding of soil functions such as OM turnover. Here, we present an interdisciplinary approach using artificial soils to study the establishment of the microbial community and the formation of macro-aggregates as a function of the mineral co...

Artificial soils were used in this study to analyse the importance of different mineral compositions for the diversity of soil microorganisms. Variants containing montmorillonite (MT), illite (IL), and illite + ferrihydrite (IL+FH) were compared to each other. Bulk material and their particle size fractions, as obtained by ultracentrifugation and w...

The fate of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in soil is determined by a suite of biotic and abiotic factors, and disentangling their role in the complex soil interaction network remains challenging. Here, we investigate the influence of soil composition on the microbial community structure and its response to the spiked model PAH compound ph...

Sorption of organic chemicals in soil is affected by the properties and availability of surfaces. These surfaces are composed of diverse mineral, organic and biological components, forming a soil's ‘biogeochemical interface’. Phenanthrene was used to probe the hydrophobic sorptive capacity of the interface of an arable soil. Batch sorption experime...

To study the influence of the clay minerals montmorillonite (M) and illite (I), the metal oxides ferrihydrite (F) and aluminium hydroxide (A), and charcoal (C) on soil bacterial communities seven artificial soils with identical texture provided by quartz (Q) were mixed with sterilized manure as organic carbon source before adding a microbial inocul...

Microbial communities in soil reside in a highly heterogeneous habitat where diverse mineral surfaces, complex organic matter and microorganisms interact with each other. This study aimed to elucidate the long-term effect of the soil mineral composition and charcoal on the microbial community composition established in matured artificial soils and...

##Assembly-Data-START## Sequencing Technology :: Sanger dideoxy sequencing ##Assembly-Data-END##

##Assembly-Data-START## Sequencing Technology :: Sanger dideoxy sequencing ##Assembly-Data-END##

Purpose Secondary ion mass spectrometry at the nanoscale (NanoSIMS) is a new and promising technique in soil science, as it allows us to explore the elemental and isotopic composition of a solid sample with high sensitivity at a submicron scale. In this study, we demonstrate that it is possible to differentiate the major components of soils by this...

The different contacting organic and inorganic components in a soil define a complex, hierarchically structured, and extremely large biogeochemical in-terface to the soil's liquid and gaseous phases (Young and Crawford, 2004). The characterization of biogeochemical interfaces in soils is essential to gain a mecha-nistic understanding of their role...

Nutrient dynamics in estuaries are temporally variable in response to changing physical–chemical conditions and biogeochemical processes involving primary producer groups such as phytoplankton, microphytobenthos, seagrass and macroalgae. In order to reveal intra-annual changes in the biomass of primary producer groups and associated changes in estu...

A novel PCR primer system that targets a wide range of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon ring-hydroxylating dioxygenase (PAH-RHDα) genes of both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria was developed and used to study their abundance and diversity in two different soils in response to phenanthrene spiking. The specificities and target ranges of the p...

In order to investigate the effect of mineral composition on the sorption of hydrophobic organic chemicals in soil, phenanthrene sorption experiments were carried out to the <20µm fraction of artificial soils containing illite, ferrihydrite and both minerals. The sorption isotherms of the ferrihydrite containing samples show a significant increase...

Interfaces in soil are affected by the characteristics of the particle surfaces present. We analysed particle size fractions of a Eutric Cambisol from a long-term field experiment in Ultuna, Sweden to gain insight into the contribution of the different particle size fractions to biogeochemical interfaces in soil. C and N content and dithionite and...

The formation of soil interfaces is controlled by the type of particle surface(s) present and the assemblage of organic matter and mineral particles. We consider clay minerals, iron oxides and charcoal as major components controlling the formation of interfaces relevant for sorption of organic chemicals because they exhibit high surface area and mi...