Environmental Monitoring Planning in River Basins: The Case of Pig Farming in River Piranga Basin

Abstract

The integrated vision of the territory and understanding of how the anthropic activities influence the available natural resources is the key point for guiding the execution of inspection and environmental control actions which, when applied to river basins, directly influence the quality and/or quantity of water, thus affecting water availability. In 2013 an environmental inspection project was elaborated for pig farming activity in River Piranga's Planning and Management of Water Resources Unit (Unidade de Planejamento e Gestão de Recursos Hídricos -UPGRH), in which it encompassed the following phases: orientation, field of activity and monitoring of post-fiscal actions. The main objective of this article is to demonstrate the efficacy of the technical planning in river basins for the execution of environmental inspection. This is achieved by evaluating the water quality performance indicators before and after inspection activities, with the application of statistical tests. The continuous inspection reached its objective, which was to increase the environmental regularization in the basin, since 94.11% of the fined enterprises, that is, 16 out of 17, were regularized. The implementation of a directed monitoring network of water quality enabled, on the part of the entrepreneur, the acknowledgment that pig farming contributes to the increase of the thermotolerant coliforms parameter and not only the gap in sewage treatment in the region.

A New Approach to Use Load Duration Curves to Evaluate Water Quality: A Study in the Doce River Basin, Brazil

“…The station RD023, on the other hand, is located in a preserved state park, the Doce State Park, away from the urban centers of both cities where it is located. Although a higher E. coli concentration is observed near the cities, it cannot be ruled out that this region is a pole of swine farming activities, which also contribute to a high concentration of pathogens, due to high percentages of waste deposition that are not respecting the environmental regulations [27].…”

“…Thus, given the lack of resources from these cities, most of them lack wastewater treatment plants, which causes most of their generated sewage to be loaded into the rivers without treatment. This situation, associated with pasture and swine activities in the basins, has caused E.coli contamination to be one of their core water quality problems [27].…”

“…Additionally, in the river courses evaluated, E. coli contamination tends to be higher upstream and decreases downstream. Throughout the Piranga basin, the main sources of pollution are likely caused by cultivated and grazed lands and swine production [27], except by gauge RD013, in which contamination is caused by failing and non-existing wastewater treatment plants.…”