Abstract
Natural background levels (NBLs) for targeted chemical elements characterize a specific groundwater body, the knowledge of which represents a fundamental information for environmental agencies responsible for the protection, management, and remediation of territory. The large number of areas subject to strong anthropogenic pressures of a different nature and magnitude makes the job of control authorities particularly difficult. The process to distinguish effective anthropogenic contamination from natural conditions and to define realistic environmental clean-up goals goes through the computation of several mutually dependent statistical methods, some of which have non-trivial resolution and interpretation. In this study, we presented a new tool designed to drive those working in the sector into an articulated path towards NBL assessment. The application software was developed in order to read environmental input data provided by a user-friendly web-based geographic information system (GIS) and to return the NBL estimate of a given chemical element following a wizard that allows for the implementation of two methodologies, i.e., component separation or pre-selection. The project was born from a collaboration between the Department of Environmental Engineering of the University of Calabria and the Department of Environmental Policies of the Calabria Region. The software was used to estimate NBLs in selected chemical species at potentially contaminated industrial sites located in Lamezia Terme, Italy. In the future, the developed calculation program will be the official evaluation tool of the Calabria Region for identifying groundwater thresholds.
Highlights
Groundwater characterization activities may be marked by the observation of large concentration values related to an aquifer’s petrographical composition rather than the pollution status of an investigated site [1]. the reliable quantification of the actual natural contribution to detected concentrations, at a field scale, is underlined by the European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive (WFD 2000/60/EC, article17), which identified significant and feasible clean-up goals
Other terms appearing in the scheme are: Web-geographic information system (GIS) which stands for online geographical information system; probability density functions (PDFs) which stands for probability density function; cumulative distribution function function (CDF) which stands for cumulative distribution function; bold letters A, B, C, D indicating four different cases in which the dataset can fall; 95p which stands for 95th percentile
The onerous and complex issue of the Natural Background Levels estimation was more addressed. the environmental agencies responsible for the protection, management, and remediation of the territories can take advantage of such a tool, since it is equipped with a graphical wizard that guides the operators to implement the component separation and pre-selection methods to perform all computations required therein. the procedure can be further improved by adding additional statistical and graphical tests, and, in the present state, is going to be the official evaluation tool of the Calabria Region to identify groundwater thresholds
Summary
Groundwater characterization activities may be marked by the observation of large concentration values related to an aquifer’s petrographical composition rather than the pollution status of an investigated site [1]. the reliable quantification of the actual natural contribution to detected concentrations, at a field scale, is underlined by the European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive (WFD 2000/60/EC, article17), which identified significant and feasible clean-up goals. Groundwater characterization activities may be marked by the observation of large concentration values related to an aquifer’s petrographical composition rather than the pollution status of an investigated site [1]. Applying remediation strategies based on compliance levels guided by current regulations might lead, in some cases, to ineffective and unaffordable cleaning targets for areas where specific natural conditions take place. Water 2020, 12, 2728 estimating natural background levels (NBLs) in groundwater gained large attention in the last decade. The Ground Water Daughter Directive (GWDD 2006/118/EC) defines the NBL as “the concentration of a substance or the value of an indicator in a body of groundwater corresponding to no, or only very minor, anthropogenic alterations to undisturbed conditions”. Optimizing remediation strategies occurs via proper NBL evaluation and the associated revision of the compliance values that can be locally modified to account for a specific context under investigation. Practical applications, based on the statistical analysis of monitored data proposed by the EU research project BRIDGE (2007) (background criteria for the identification of groundwater thresholds [7]) have been frequently employed for NBL estimation and are available in the literature for several countries such as Germany, Italy, Spain, and South Korea [2,3,4,5,6,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]
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