Handbook on the Selection of Methods for Digestion and Determination of Total Phosphorus in Environmental Samples

Dana Zimmer, Karen Baumann, Maximilian Berthold, Rhena Schumann

Version 1.0 (2020)

Preface

Water and soil analytics have been performed at the Biological Station Zingst and at the department of Soil Science at the University of Rostock for decades. While doing so, students’ insecurities in dealing with laboratory glassware, chemicals and other materials became obvious. Especially knowledge about the common practice of quality management, which is required by law, seemed to be little.

Another noticeable problem in today’s scientific landscape and the environmental mentoring is the wide gap between scientific and technical work. This hampers the transfer of knowledge and experiences as well as the understanding of methods and complicates a problem-oriented allocation of resources (effort (method selection e.g. molybdenum blue vs. ICP-OES), accuracy, correctness, reproducibility).

Observing these deficiencies, the authors compiled this book on analytics, which not only contains a detailed description of methods but also compiles the most important terms and tools to ensure and illustrate precision, correctness, measuring range and specificity of analytic results. There are examples of the quality parameters and (in many cases) comparative measurements of different methods or versions for each method and each material. This book combines the underlying theory (often known for a long time) with detailed step by step instruction, materials, simple calculations, examples, photographs, tips and tricks.

Individual chapters are published sequentially as collection of pages, which are constantly updated on the intranet of the Leibniz ScienceCampus Phosphorus Research: