The environmental and health effects of the contamination of soils by heavy metals depend on the ability of the soils to immobilize these contaminants. In this work, the adsorption and desorption of Cu and Zn in the surface layers of 27 acid soils were studied. Adsorption of Cull from 157-3148 mu mol L-1 solutions was much greater than adsorption of Zn-II from solutions at the same concentration. For both Cu and Zn, the adsorption data were fitted better by the Freundlich equation than by the Langmuir equation. Multiple regression analyses suggest that Cu and Zn adsorption depends to a significant extent on pH and CEC: for both metals these variables accounted for more than 80% of the variance in the Freundlich pre-exponential parameter K-F, and pH also accounted for 57% of the variance in 1/17 for Zn and, together with carbon content, for 41% of the variance in I In for Cu. The percentage of adsorbed metal susceptible to desorption into 0.01 M NaNO3 was greater for Zn than for Cu, but in both cases depended significantly on pH, decreasing as pH increased. In turn, both pH(H2O) and pH(KCl) are significantly correlated with cation exchange capacity. Desorption of metal adsorbed from solutions at relatively low concentration (787 mu mol L-1) exhibited power-law dependence on Kd, the quotient expressing distribution between soil and soil solution in the corresponding adsorption experiment, decreasing as increasing Kd reflected increasing affinity of the soil for the metal. The absence of a similarly clear relationship when metal had been adsorbed from solutions at relatively high concentration (2361 mu mol L-1) is attributed to the scant between-soil variability of Kd at these higher concentrations. In general, adsorption was greater and subsequent desorption less in cultivated soils than in woodland soils. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.