Importance of Integrated Watershed Management on Water Quality

Abstract

The management and planning of water resources recently become important and increasingly complex. While the most of the developed countries managed their water source with sustainable plans to water production, our country has newly started the work within its watershed management principles. Due to excessive population growth the environmental problems blow out after industrialization, land degradation, wrong agricultural and forestry applications. These misapplications negatively affect water resources. Drinking water resources are divided into surface water and groundwater. The water needs of settlements are mostly covered by surface water resources. For water supply generally a dam is built into the most suitable lower part of the river. However, the basins contain not only forests and meadows, but also settlements, livestock and agricultural activities. The required quality and quantity of drinking water production have become very difficult and expensive due to this reason. Integrated watershed management aims to protect water resources and improve the quality of drinking water with a systematic and comprehensive approach to addressing all these problems. European countries enforced a water framework directive in 2000 in order to produce and protect water resources according to common standards. This provided continuous monitoring of physicochemical, chemical, biological and hydro-morphological quality of water as measured by the Water Framework Directive.

This study illustrates the sustainability of renewable water source and to plan for sustainable water production with considering climate, geology, topography, soil, vegetation cover, land use types and socio-economic elements and relations between them by the determined management principles.

Keywords

• Importance of Integrated Watershed Management on Water Quality

References

1. Emre BABUR1*, Ömer KARA2 1Department of Soil and Ecology, Faculty of Forestry, Karadeniz Technical University, Trabzon, TURKEY 2Department of Watershed Management, Faculty of Forestry, Karadeniz Technical University, Trabzon, TURKEY
2. *Corresponding author: [e-mail]