Université Nangui Abrogoua, UFR des Sciences de la Nature, Pôle de Recherche Production Végétale, Unité de Recherche Agrophysiologie, 02 BP 801 Abidjan 02, Côte d'Ivoire
Like many cities in the world, the city of Abidjan has experienced, in recent years, a significant development of market gardening. At the same time, the popularization of urban agriculture is controversial in terms of food security given the exposure of crops to pollutants, including trace elements, generated by agricultural practices and urban activities. In this work, we have compared, by a principal components analysis, the potential for the accumulation of five trace metals, cadmium, copper, lead, zinc and nickel, by three market garden species, lettuce, spinach and amaranth. The market garden species came from two market gardening sites, Marcory and Cocody, and the experimental plot of Nangui Abrogoua University. The results showed that lettuce has a greater capacity for accumulation of the five metals than for spinach and amaranth. However, amaranth and spinach from the three sites showed almost the same metal accumulation capacity.