River Basin Management

Progress Towards Implementation of the European Water Framework Directive

John Lawson, John Lawson

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000448160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Idrologia

River Basin Management is a collection of papers presented at a conference on implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive, held in Budapest in May 2005. The Water Framework Directive requires progressive protection and enhancement to rivers, lakes, estuaries, coastal waters and wetlands by the year 2015. At the heart of this major new piece of legislation is the requirement for all EU member states to prepare river basin management plans for all river basin catchments, providing the basis for coordinated improvements to water management, leading to better water quality and sustainable aquatic environments in lakes and rivers. The papers cover a wide range of topics including pilot studies for the development of river basin management plans, public participation in the planning process, water quality monitoring, modeling and analysis, identifying and addressing pollution and meeting environmental objectives. The book presents an array of experience from eighteen European countries in the implementation of the EU's most far reaching environmental legislation. It is an invaluable source of information and ideas for the widespread preparation of river basin management plans now starting throughout Europe.

Comparative assessment of nutrient fluxes in five medium size European river catchments

M. Zessner
Institute for Water Quality and Waste Management, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

C. Postolache
Department of System Ecology, University of Bucharest, Romania

A. Kovacs
Department of Sanitary and Environmental Engineering, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary

Ch. Schilling
Institute for Water Quality and Waste Management, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

ABSTRACT: This paper shows the results from nutrient emission calculations from five river catchments with altogether 26 subcatchments within the Danube Basin. The paper compares the emissions via different pathways in the different subcatchments to each other and discusses the applicability of MONERIS emission model under the specific conditions in the Danube Basin. As an overall result it can be shown that MONERIS is a very useful tool for assessment of nutrient emissions in river catchments especially on a large scale. While for nitrogen the accuracy of results is rather high, there are still problems with the accuracy of phosphorus balances at catchment scale.

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 The daNUbs-project

Worldwide it is recognized that river basin management can play a key role for sustainability in water and land use as well as in coastal management. While this task is already difficult at smaller scale for river basins influencing only the national coastal areas it becomes even more complex in trans-boundary river basins which may affect a multinational coastline. It is therefore critical to base coastal water quality management on sound scientific understanding of the relation between pollution and water quality in the whole catchment. Successful strategies for sustainable coastal development consequently need to be based on sound political and economic considerations on full catchment scale.

Discharges from the rivers influence strongly the quality of the receiving seas. Therefore the mitigation of problems in the Sea requires a proper management of emissions in the river's catchments. Within this context, nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) play a dominant role:

• even if river quality standards are met, nutrients may still have a strong effect on the marine coastal areas and result in eutrophication;
• pollution from both diffused and point sources is important;
• the nutrient storage in the catchment (soil, groundwater etc. ) is orders of magnitude higher than the yearly nutrient turnover;
• the entire population is c...