Environmental, biological and ecosystem-specific properties may influence the transfer of chemical elements (CEs) from soils to plants, including the variation in the chemical elements’ concentration, their types and physiological parameters, such as biotransformation ability in the plants.

The interface between the soil and a plant, or, the concentration of a particular chemical element in a plant with respect to its concentration in the soil, is the basis for a widely used Biological Absorption Coefficient, also known as the Transfer Factor, Bioaccumulation Factor, Mobility Ratio, or Plant–Soil Coefficient, which are expressed in terms of the chemical element’s concentration in the plant and soil. However, from the biogeochemical perspective, these coefficients/factors can provide a comparison of the chemical element (CE) concentration in different media (plants and soil), but only in a particular place (under typical environmental conditions) and at a particular time. Therefore, a quantitative method, using the dynamic factors of bioaccumulation, biophilicity, translocation, bioavailability and phytoremediation , is offered to assess the variation in the process of the uptake of chemical elements by different plants, to evaluate the influence of soil modification on their participation in the plants’ metabolism and to perform quantitative evaluation of phytoremediation efficiency over a particular period of time.

Dynamic factors help to identify and demonstrate more than only the primary causes (e.g. the total CEs concentration in the substrate) for intensive CEs transfer to a plant. For this purpose, the relationship between the CE concentrations in the morphological part of a plant and CE concentration in the substrate is used. It allows the available biogeochemical data on biophilic CEs and the barrier and non-barrier plants to be used in the evaluation. The dynamic bioavailability, bioaccumulation and translocation factors also show that physical and chemical changes in soil can cause physiological variation in biogeochemical migration of substances in a plant. Determining the transfer intensity based on using the dynamic factors of bioaccumulation and biophilicity, it has been found that the biotic and abiotic factors, influence plants and can be characterized by a similar bioaccumulation level of CEs. This helps to evaluate the scope of activity and importance of these factors.

The calculation of the bioaccumulation factors in the process of evaluating the extent of contamination and the effect of CEs helps to more accurately define the affected zone of an ecosystem and to determine the role of plants as the primary geochemical (biogeochemical) barriers to aerogenic CE transfer. Thus, the use of the dynamic factor method for assessing the quality of the environment is effective in evaluating environmental risks, biogeochemical CE migration, the environmental effect of CEs migration and the efficiency of phytotechnologies.