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This paper offers an overview of the history, the present state and the outlook for the future of tile drainage on agricultural lands of the Czech Republic. Being located in a zone of moderate climate, the country does not need drainage as a corrective measure after irrigation. Draining of agricultural mineral soils took place on a large scale over almost the whole of the twentieth century. Today, virtually no drainage systems are being either built anew or rehabilitated, but most of them are still working. Negative and positive impacts of land drainage on catchment runoff, water balance, groundwater hydrology, nitrate leaching and local climate are described. The future of land drainage depends on the prospects of agriculture. At present, the doing-nothing option prevails. In future, some of the existing drainage systems may be rebuilt as controlled systems combining drainage, retention and irrigation. Studies on the impact of land drainage and land use changes on nitrate leaching and microclimate indicate the need for corrective measures.

Abstract:Tile drainage water temperatures and discharge rates were measured in five highland watersheds of which most are underlain by acid crystalline rock. One of them, Dehtáře in the Bohemo-Moravian highland (Czech Republic), was studied in greater detail. The aim was to evaluate water temperature monitoring as a means of determining the source and pathway of drainage runoff during high-flow events. Rapid increase in drainage discharge was accompanied by rapid change in water temperature. In winter, the rising limb of the hydrograph was accompanied by a decrease in temperature, and the falling limb was associated with a corresponding temperature increase. In summer, the trends were reversed. These data suggest that the water temperature changes are caused by the fastest component of drainage runoff, water from a precipitation event or snowmelt, which can be separated from the remainder of the hydrograph. Measurements of hydraulic conductivity, soil moisture content, soil temperature, and groundwater table level indicate that the major portion of the event water causing this effect infiltrates in the watershed recharge zone where soils are permeable, enters the weathered bedrock, flows preferentially and rapidly down the slope along disjoint fissures in the bedrock, finally emerging as ascending springs, and is, for the most part, intercepted by the tile drainage systems.

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The ecological status of many surface waters in the Czech Republic is poor, mainly due to still relatively high discharges of N substances especially from agriculture. High nitrate values in the streams situated particulary in basins of drinking water reservoirs invoke the neccesity for the precise detection of diffuse pollution areas to enable the setting of the appropriate land management strategies or relevant measures. We introduce a simple method for estimating the changes of nitrate concentrations in surface waters regarding the land use modification. Stream and drainage water nitrate concentrations in prevailingly agricultural catchments of three different scales located in the Crystalline complex of the Czech massif were included in this study. Water quality samples were collected through the years 1992–2006 at monthly and bi-monthly intervals. For the catchment land use analysis, the satellite images LANDSAT 7 (CORINE Land Cover) and digitised cadastre maps of the land register were processed using ESRI ArcMap GIS; both sources corrected by field survey. We demonstrate on three different basin – scale studies a strong relation between the arable land ratio within a catchment and the coherent stream water nitrate concentration. The results acquired from all the evaluated catchments showed that every 10% decrease of ploughed land proportion in a catchment lowers the nitrate concentration C90 value (90% probability of non-exceedance) in average by 6.38 mg/l.

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