Sustainable Forestry: Collection 87-88 info:eu-repo/semantics/article eng soil, microwave digestion, trace metals, ICP-OES, PCA, HCA application/pdf 354384 bytes Božović, Jelena STAJIĆ, Snežana ĐORĐEVIĆ, Ilija KONATAR, Bojan ČEŠLJAR, Goran ŽIVOJINOVIĆ, Dragana The goal of this investigation was to assess the presence, content and limit concentrations of macro elements of plant nutrituion, trace elements, and potentially toxic elements in the soil. The research was carried out in Kopaonik, Crni Vrh and Mokra Gora during the period 2020-2022 on the different depths. Samples were prepared by microwave digestion with mixture of mineral acids. Concentration of extractedelements were measured by Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES). The method of sample preparation is very important for the successful determination of elements because it is a very complex matrixChemometric approach was applied to explain the distribution of elements and potentially toxic elements in the soil by location and sampling depth. Principal Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis have proven to be excellent tools for reducing the number of measurements and for grouping data by parameters and by sampling location. Research has shown that there was no major soil contamination with toxic metals in the selected areas. ASSESSMENT OF THE CONTENT OF MACRO, MICRO AND POTENTIALLY TOXIC ELEMENTS IN THE SOIL OF THE SERBIAN MOUNTAINS BY MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode 2023 https://unilib.phaidrabg.rs/o:3765 doi:10.5937/SustFor2388001B ISSN: 1821-1046 Институт за шумарство