ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a wide variety of approaches and models exist to describe plant uptake of organic microcontaminants from soil, irrigation water, and air into plants and crops. Predictive models can be classified according to their approach and complexity in two large categories: empirical and mechanistic. Different models have been developed to predict the prevalence of antibiotic resistance genes and antibiotic resistant bacteria in the environment. A fugacity model has been designed for assessing the fate of biosolids-derived chemicals in amended soil and concentrations in plant, vertebrate and mammal receptors can be predicted. The uptake of organic contaminants by plants is an area of growing interest during the 21st century. Fantke et al. (2011) presented a dynamic plant uptake model for various crops based on a flexible set of interconnected compartments. The transfer of pharmaceuticals from contaminated soil, through plant uptake into dairy food production chain has been developed.
