Source-oriented probabilistic ecological and human health risk assessment of urban road dust using an open-source...

Urban road dust (URD) acts as both a sink and a secondary emission source of potentially toxic elements (PTEs), posing ecological and human health risks in rapidly urbanizing cities. Although source-oriented probabilistic risk assessment integrating positive matrix factorization (PMF) with Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) has advanced, applications remain largely confined to industrial cities and often rely on commercial software, limiting reproducibility and transferability. Here, we develop and apply a fully open-source PMF-MCS framework implemented in R to quantify pollution characteristics, source contributions, and probabilistic ecological and human health risks of nine PTEs in URD from Da Nang, a tropical coastal city in central Vietnam. Three dominant sources were identified based on PMF inference: traffic (44.8%), service-industrial activities (30.1%), and natural background (25.2%). Cd (1.28 mg/kg) and Sb (1.62 mg/kg) exhibited strong enrichment, with Sb controlling 71-94% of the integrated pollution index (INI = 3.11). Mean ecological risk was classified as "low ecological risk" (NCRI = 102.5), whereas upper-percentile values (P95 = 351.5) reached "high" to "very high ecological risk", reflecting localized hotspot conditions rather than widespread city-scale risk, driven by Cd and Sb enriched areas associated with traffic and service-industrial sources. Non-carcinogenic risks remained below thresholds across all populations, while carcinogenic risk fell within the cautionary range (10^-6-10^-4), particularly for children (mean TCR = 5.51 × 10^-6), dominated by As (69-82%) and traffic-related sources (46-48%). This study provides a source-oriented probabilistic assessment of URD in a tropical coastal Southeast Asian city and delivers a transparent, reproducible framework for risk-informed urban environmental management.