Di Lorenzo, T., & Galassi, D. M. P. (2013). Agricultural impact on Mediterranean alluvial aquifers: do groundwater communities respond? Fundamental and Applied Limnology/Archiv für Hydrobiologie, 182(4), 271–282.
Abstract: In Mediterranean countries agricultural development heavily depends on groundwater availability due
to arid and semi-arid climate and poor surface-water resources. Agriculture represents one of the most relevant
pressures which generate impacts in alluvial aquifers by means of fertilizers and pesticides usage and groundwater
overexploitation. Until now, very few studies have addressed the ecological response of groundwater fauna to
groundwater contamination and overexploitation due to agricultural practices. We investigated a Mediterranean
alluvial aquifer heavily affected by nitrates contamination and groundwater abstraction stress due to crop irrigation. The aim of this study was to evaluate the sensitivity of groundwater communities to (a) groundwater nitrate
contamination, (b) groundwater abstraction due to irrigation practices, and (c) saltwater intrusion. The present
work suggests that nitrate concentration lower than 150 mg l
–1 is not an immediate threat to groundwater biodiversity in alluvial aquifers. This conclusion must be carefully considered in the light of the total lack of knowledge
of the effects of long-term nitrate pollution on the groundwater biota. Moreover, local extinctions of less tolerant
species, prior to monitoring, cannot be ruled out. Conversely, species abundances in ground water are affected by
groundwater withdrawal, but species richness may be less sensitive. This result is attributable to the disappearance
of saturated microhabitats and to the depletion of fine unconsolidated sediments, reducing the surface available
to bacterial biofilm, which represent the trophic resource for several groundwater invertebrates and where the
main aquifer self-purification processes, such as denitrification, take place. Saltwater intrusion seems not to affect
groundwater species at the values measured in this coastal aquifer.
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Bailey, R. T. (2017). Selenium contamination, fate, and reactive transport in groundwater in relation to human health. Hydrogeology Journal, 25(4), 1191–1217.
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Bouzourra, H., Bouhlila, R., Elango, L., Slama, F., & Ouslati, N. (2015). Characterization of mechanisms and processes of groundwater salinization in irrigated coastal area using statistics, GIS, and hydrogeochemical investigations. Environmental Science and Pollution Research, 22(4), 2643–2660.
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Kisi, O., Liepelt, K., & Kulls, C. (2023). Discussion of “Improving Prediction Accuracy of Hydrologic Time Series by Least-Squares Support Vector Machine Using Decomposition Reconstruction and Swarm Intelligence”. Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, 28(4), 07023001.
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Dhar, A., & Patil, R. S. (2011). Fuzzy uncertainty based design of groundwater quality monitoring networks. J. Environ. Res. Develop., 5(3a), 683–688.
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