Abstract
Karst aquifers hold important water resources such as regional water budgets and freshwater supply. Due to highly dynamic hydrological processes in comparison to other less permeable systems, they are particularly susceptible to environmental changes. However, little research directly characterizes the impacts of climate and vegetation cover changes on karst water sources. In this study, we aimed to evaluate individual long-term impacts and impacts of sudden large-scale forest disturbances on changes in groundwater recharge and in spring discharge. The work is based on temporal analysis of forest cover and a comparison of trend analysis of hydro-meteorological parameters. To investigate and evaluate vegetation cover change impacts on groundwater recharge, we used a soil water balance model and compared estimated actual daily values of effective precipitation to its fictional estimation disregarding the vegetation cover change. The applied methodology enabled quantification of the impacts of climate and vegetation cover change on selected karst water sources. The study suggests that the vegetation cover can have a significant impact on the spring recharge. Large-scale disturbances that occurred in a short-term mitigated the effects expected from the trend analysis of hydro-meteorological parameters. In the long-term, in addition to climate changes, the multi-decadal natural vegetation overgrowth significantly contributed to the reduction in the spring’s discharge values, especially in the warm season when water demand is higher. Therefore, the results are of key importance for developing proper water management and environmental policies.
Highlights
The importance of aquifers with karst porosity, which already supply around a quarter of the global needs for drinking water, is gradually increasing [1]
Results of the long-term trend analysis show that the magnitude of a decrease in runoff differs between the studied springs
Since an apparent difference in long-term vegetation cover change in the catchments of the studied spring exists, both climate and vegetation factors have been considered for the interpretation of a long-term decrease of mean annual discharges of the springs
Summary
The importance of aquifers with karst porosity, which already supply around a quarter of the global needs for drinking water, is gradually increasing [1] This proportion even exceeds half of the demand of individual countries in the areas of the Dinaric Karst [2], the largest contiguous karst region in Europe [3], and in the Alps. These areas are mostly covered by forest and are important for its rich and unique (underground) ecosystems [4,5]. Fast diffuse and concentrated infiltration, high heterogeneity and anisotropy, mainly conditioned by the position of conduits and fast transport from inputs to the springs, is characteristic. A specificity of karst hydrology is the great variability in flow and transport processes as a function of temporal hydrological conditions [10,11], which can have practical implications for groundwater abstraction in terms of adequate quantity and quality
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