Delineating cost‐effective wellhead protection zones in a rural area in Greece

Abstract

The aim of this study is the protection of groundwater resources from nitrate pollution by regulating land use and by establishing guidelines for agricultural activities within specific wellhead protection areas. Wellhead protection zones are specifically designed in four wells in the municipality of Nea Moudania, an area of intensive agricultural activities in northern Greece. Recent water samples from these wells indicate high levels of nitrates concentrations. Wellhead protection areas are delineated through a geographic information systems (GIS) analysis in order to determine the boundaries of protection zones, as well as to identify the land use patterns and the specific crop types around the contaminated wells. Different land use management techniques for groundwater protection zoning are also examined with respect to their implementation cost. The purpose of this analysis is to identify the least expensive management strategy for wellhead protection. The results show that land use changes are always more expensive than implementing agroenvironmental measures.

Spatial variation of crop rotations and their impacts on provisioning ecosystem services on the river Drava alluvial plain

“…Nitrate leaching Table 7 The effects of all scenarios on average annual nitrogen balance of the HRUs in the simulation period (2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011) Table 4. at the site located within the NVZ perimeter was not observed due to favourable soil textural characteristics with deep, fine texture soil, while on shallow and stony soil nitrate leaching was substantial. This is even more important because the Water Framework Directive obliges EU Member States to improve the quality status of the entire aquifer and not only parts of the aquifer in the vicinity of wells for drinking water abstraction (Siarkos et al, 2014). In order to make this possible it is necessary to prepare a soil map of greater precision, since it is obvious that the existing map at a scale of 1:25,000 is not optimal.…”

Διαχείριση Υδατικών Πόρων Υπό Συνθήκες Κλιματικής Αλλαγής Με Τη Χρήση Πολυκριτηριακής Ανάλυσης

“…• Μείωση της παραγωγής στη γεωργία και της απόδοσης των καλλιεργειών, αύξηση (Λατινόπουλος κ.α., 2005). (191,192,193): ρωγματικό Χολομώντα-Ωραιοκάστρου (Siarkos, Latinopoulos and Katirtzidou, 2014;Σιάρκος, 2015;Siarkos and Latinopoulos, 2016)…”