Water Pollution and Water Quality Assessment of Major Transboundary Rivers from Banat (Romania)

Andreea-Mihaela Dunca

doi:10.1155/2018/9073763

Abstract

This study focuses on water resources management and shows the need to enforce the existing international bilateral agreements and to implement the Water Framework Directive of the European Union in order to improve the water quantity and quality received by a downstream country of a common watershed, like Timiş-Bega hydrographical basin, shared by two countries (Romania and Serbia). The spatial trend of water quality index(WQI)and its subindexes are important for determining the locations of major pollutant sources that contribute to water quality depletion in this basin. We compared the values of WQI obtained for 10 sections of the two most important rivers from Banat, which have a great importance for socioeconomic life in southwestern part of Romania and in northeastern part of Serbia. In order to assess the water quality, we calculated theWQIfor a long period of time (2004–2014), taking into account the maximum, minimum, and the mean annual values of physical, chemical, and biological parameters (DO,pH,BOD5,temperature,total P,N-NO2−, andturbidity). This article highlights the importance of using the water quality index which has not been sufficiently explored in Romania and for transboundary rivers and which is very useful in improving rivers water quality.

Highlights

The water quality from the rivers has a considerable importance for the reason that these water resources are generally used for multiple matters such as: drinking domestic and residential water supplies, agriculture, hydroelectric power plants, transportation and infrastructure, tourism, recreation, and other human or economic ways to use water [1].For a given river the water quality is the result of several interrelated parameters with a local and temporal variation which are influenced by the water flow rate during the year [2].In the context of sustainable water management, many hydrological studies have been published around the world, which highlights the ecological role of water from the rivers
(4) rivers, taking into account the maximum annual, the minimum annual, and the mean annual values of 7 following physical, chemical, and biological parameters: DO, pH, BOD5O, 2N/L-N),Ote2m− p(teortaatlunreit(r∘aCte)s, total P in mg, and turbidity, with units of measurement adapted according to International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC)
The results of this paper present the water polluting and quality assessment of two transboundary rivers (Timis and Bega) from two different hydrographical basins and show that water quality index (WQI) values of the Timis River ranging from 86 to 58 and WQI values of the Bega River ranging from 85 to 61 denote degradation of water quality downstream of the rivers

Summary

Introduction

The water quality from the rivers has a considerable importance for the reason that these water resources are generally used for multiple matters such as: drinking domestic and residential water supplies, agriculture (irrigation), hydroelectric power plants, transportation and infrastructure, tourism, recreation, and other human or economic ways to use water [1].For a given river the water quality is the result of several interrelated parameters with a local and temporal variation which are influenced by the water flow rate during the year [2].In the context of sustainable water management, many hydrological studies have been published around the world, which highlights the ecological role of water from the rivers. The water quality from the rivers has a considerable importance for the reason that these water resources are generally used for multiple matters such as: drinking domestic and residential water supplies, agriculture (irrigation), hydroelectric power plants, transportation and infrastructure, tourism, recreation, and other human or economic ways to use water [1]. There have been more researches based upon water quality evaluation [3,4,5]. This category of studies is related to the quality of watercourses which generally use many statistical and mathematical models. Most of the studies related to the assessment of the water resources quality use several water quality indices among the most important are water quality index (WQI), water pollution index (WPI), and river habitat survey (RHS) [6, 7]

Methods

Results

Conclusion