ИСТИНА

We studied soils formed at the abandoned industrial waste disposal sites in Kursk region, central part of European Russia, forest-steppe zone. We considered two cases of dumps: the one was a landfill of solid industrial wastes abandoned in 1990s, then recultivated in early2000s, and the other sugar waste lagoons of closed and operationg sugar factories. Multitemporal remote sensing analysis was done to find out the history of functioning waste disposal sites in study and map land use/land cover changes for the long-term period (from the 1950s). Chemical analysis of sampled soils and results of soil carbon dioxide emissions surveys revealed that soils formed at the landfill are heavily contaminated with several toxic elements (cadmium, lead, nickel, stibium), but don't significantly differ in average CO2 emission rate from the background sites of old fallows and unmanaged overgrown slopes of beams and ravines. Soils of completely abandoned sugar waste lagoons are now presented mainly by Phaeozems but differed in subtypes and properties according to the age of abandonment and successive overgrowth by grass or tree vegetation and currend land use. For the Garbic Technosol of periodically flooded by filtration sludge sugar waste lagoons we fixed abnormally high CO2 soil emissions - more 10 times as high as in soils of completely abandoned lagoons.