| 1. |
- Augustsson, Anna, et al.
(författare)
-
The risk of overestimating the risk-metal leaching to groundwater near contaminated glass waste deposits and exposure via drinking water
- 2016
-
Ingår i: Science of the Total Environment. - : Elsevier BV. - 0048-9697 .- 1879-1026. ; 566, s. 1420-1431
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study investigates metal contamination patterns and exposure to Sb, As, Ba, Cd and Pb via intake of drinking water in a region in southeastern Sweden where the production of artistic glass has resulted in a large number of contaminated sites. Despite high total concentrations of metals in soil and groundwater at the glassworks sites properties, all drinking water samples from households with private wells, located at a 30-640 m distance from a glassworks site, were below drinking water criteria from the WHO for Sb, As, Ba and Cd. A few drinking water samples showed concentrations of Pb above the WHO guideline, but As was the only element found in concentrations that could result in human exposure near toxicological reference values. An efficient retention of metals in the natural soil close to the source areas, which results in a moderate impact on local drinking water, is implied. Firstly, by the lack of significant difference in metal concentrations when comparing households located upstream and downstream of the main waste deposits, and secondly, by the lack of correlation between the metal concentration in drinking water and distance to the nearest glassworks site. However, elevated Pb and Cd concentrations in drinking water around glassworks sites when compared to regional groundwater indicate that diffuse contamination of the soils found outside the glassworks properties, and not only the glass waste landfills, may have a significant impact on groundwater quality. We further demonstrate that different mobilization patterns apply to different metals. Regarding the need to use reliable data to assess drinking water contamination and human exposure, we finally show that the conservative modelling approaches that are frequently used in routine risk assessments may result in exposure estimates many times higher than those based on measured concentrations in the drinking water that is actually being used for consumption. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
|
|
| 2. |
- Cantoni, Jacopo, et al.
(författare)
-
Legacy contributions to diffuse water pollution : Data-driven multi-catchment quantification for nutrients and carbon
- 2023
-
Ingår i: Science of the Total Environment. - : Elsevier BV. - 0048-9697 .- 1879-1026. ; 879, s. 163092-
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Legacy pollutants are increasingly proposed as possible reasons for widespread failures to improve water quality, de -spite the implementation of stricter regulations and mitigation measures. This study investigates this possibility, using multi-catchment data and relatively simple, yet mechanistically-based, source distinction relationships between water discharges and chemical concentrations and loads. The relationships are tested and supported by the available catch -ment data. They show dominant legacy contributions for total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP) and total organic carbon (TOC) across catchment locations and scales, from local to country-wide around Sweden. Consistently across the study catchments, close relationships are found between the legacy concentrations of TN and TOC and the land shares of agriculture and of the sum of agriculture and forests, respectively. The legacy distinction and quantification capabilities provided by the data-driven approach of this study could guide more effective pollution mitigation and should be tested in further research for other chemicals and various sites around the world.
|
|
| 3. |
- Ferreira, Carla S. S., et al.
(författare)
-
Soil degradation in the European Mediterranean region : Processes, status and consequences
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Science of the Total Environment. - : Elsevier BV. - 0048-9697 .- 1879-1026. ; 805
-
Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Soil, a non-renewable resource, sustains life on Earth by supporting around 95% of global food production and providing ecosystem services such as biomass production, filtration of contaminants and transfer of mass and energy between spheres. Unsustainable management practices and climate change are threatening the natural capital of soils, particularly in the Mediterranean region, where increasing population, rapid land-use changes, associated socio-economic activities and climate change are imposing high pressures on the region's shallow soils. Despite evidence of high soil susceptibility to degradation and desertification, the true extent of soil degradation in the region is unknown. This paper reviews and summarises the scientific literature and relevant official reports, with the aim to advance this knowledge by synthesizing, mapping, and identifying gaps regarding the status, causes, and consequences of soil degradation processes in the European Mediterranean region. This is needed as scientific underpinning of efforts to counteract soil degradation in the region. Three main degradation categories are then considered: physical (soil sealing, compaction, erosion), chemical (soil organic matter, contamination, salinisation), and biological. We find some degradation processes to be relatively well documented (e.g. soil erosion), while others, such as loss of biodiversity, remain poorly addressed, with limited data availability. We suggest establishment of a continuous, harmonised soil monitoring system at national and regional scale in the Mediterranean region to provide comparable datasets and chart the spatial extent and temporal changes in soil degradation, and corresponding economic implications. This is critical to support decision making and fulfilment of related sustainable development goals.
|
|
| 4. |
- Goldenberg, Romain, et al.
(författare)
-
Distinction, quantification and mapping of potential and realized supply-demand of flow-dependent ecosystem services
- 2017
-
Ingår i: Science of the Total Environment. - : Elsevier. - 0048-9697 .- 1879-1026. ; 593, s. 599-609
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study addresses and conceptualizes the possible dependence of ecosystem services on prevailing air and/or water flow processes and conditions, and particularly on the trajectories and associated spatial reach of these flows in carrying services from supply to demand areas in the landscape. The present conceptualization considers and accounts for such flow-dependence in terms of potential and actually realized service supply and demand, which may generally differ and must therefore be distinguished due to and accounting for the prevailing conditions of service carrier flows. We here concretize and quantify such flow-dependence for a specific landscape case (the Stockholm region, Sweden) and for two examples of regulating ecosystem services: local climate regulation and storm water regulation. For these service and landscape examples, we identify, quantify and map key areas of potential and realized service supply and demand, based for the former (potential) on prevailing relatively static types of landscape conditions (such as land-cover/use, soil type and demographics), and for the latter (realized) on relevant carrier air and water flows. These first-order quantification examples constitute first steps towards further development of generally needed such flow-dependence assessments for various types of ecosystem services in different landscapes over the world.
|
|
| 5. |
- Hambäck, Peter A., et al.
(författare)
-
Tradeoffs and synergies in wetland multifunctionality : A scaling issue
- 2023
-
Ingår i: Science of the Total Environment. - Amsterdam : Elsevier BV. - 0048-9697 .- 1879-1026. ; 862
-
Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Wetland area in agricultural landscapes has been heavily reduced to gain land for crop production, but in recent years there is increased societal recognition of the negative consequences from wetland loss on nutrient retention, biodiversity and a range of other benefits to humans. The current trend is therefore to re-establish wetlands, often with an aim to achieve the simultaneous delivery of multiple ecosystem services, i.e., multifunctionality. Here we review the literature on key objectives used to motivate wetland re-establishment in temperate agricultural landscapes (provision of flow regulation, nutrient retention, climate mitigation, biodiversity conservation and cultural ecosystem services), and their relationships to environmental properties, in order to identify potential for tradeoffs and synergies concerning the development of multifunctional wetlands. Through this process, we find that there is a need for a change in scale from a focus on single wetlands to wetlandscapes (multiple neighboring wetlands including their catchments and surrounding landscape features) if multiple societal and environmental goals are to be achieved. Finally, we discuss the key factors to be considered when planning for re-establishment of wetlands that can support achievement of a wide range of objectives at the landscape scale.
|
|
| 6. |
- Kalantari, Zahra, et al.
(författare)
-
Assessing flood probability for transportation infrastructure based on catchment characteristics, sediment connectivity and remotely sensed soil moisture
- 2019
-
Ingår i: Science of the Total Environment. - : Elsevier BV. - 0048-9697 .- 1879-1026. ; 661, s. 393-406
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Flooding may damage important transportation infrastructures, such as roads, railways and bridges, which need to be well planned and designed to be able to withstand current and possible future climate-driven increases in flood frequencies and magnitudes. This study develops a novel approach to predictive statistical modelling of the probability of flooding at major road-stream intersection sites, where water, sediment and debris can accumulate and cause failure of drainage facilities and associated road damages. Two areas in south-west Sweden, affected by severe floods in August 2014, are used in representative case studies for this development. A set of physical catchment-descriptors (PCDs), characterizing key aspects of topography, morphology, soil type, land use, hydrology (precipitation and soil moisture) and sediment connectivity in the water-and sediment-contributing catchments, are used for the predictive flood modelling. A main novel contribution to such modelling is to integrate the spatiotemporal characteristics of remotely-sensed soil moisture in indices of sediment connectivity (IC), thereby also allowing for investigation of the role of soil moisture in the flood probability for different road-stream intersections. The results suggest five categories of PCDs as especially important for flood probability quantification and identification of particularly flood-prone intersections along roads (railways, etc.) These include: channel slope at the road-stream intersection and average elevation, soil properties (mainly percentage of till), land use cover (mainly percentage of urban areas), and a sediment connectivity index that considers soil moisture in addition to morphology over the catchment.
|
|
| 7. |
- Kalantari, Zahra, et al.
(författare)
-
Flood probability quantification for road infrastructure : Data-driven spatial-statistical approach and case study applications
- 2017
-
Ingår i: Science of the Total Environment. - : Elsevier BV. - 0048-9697 .- 1879-1026. ; 581, s. 386-398
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Climate-driven increase in the frequency of extreme hydrological events is expected to impose greater strain on the built environment and major transport infrastructure, such as roads and railways. This study develops a data-driven spatial-statistical approach to quantifying and mapping the probability of flooding at critical road-stream intersection locations, where water flow and sediment transport may accumulate and cause serious road damage. The approach is based on novel integration of key watershed and road characteristics, including also measures of sediment connectivity. The approach is concretely applied to and quantified for two specific study case examples in southwest Sweden, with documented road flooding effects of recorded extreme rainfall. The novel contributions of this study in combining a sediment connectivity account with that of soil type, land use, spatial precipitation-runoff variability and road drainage in catchments, and in extending the connectivity measure use for different types of catchments, improve the accuracy of model results for road flood probability.
|
|
| 8. |
- Levi, Lea, et al.
(författare)
-
Data-driven analysis of nutrient inputs and transfers through nested catchments
- 2018
-
Ingår i: Science of the Total Environment. - : Elsevier BV. - 0048-9697 .- 1879-1026. ; 610, s. 482-494
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A data-driven screening methodology is developed for estimating nutrient input and retention-delivery in catchments with measured water discharges and nutrient concentrations along the river network. The methodology is applied to the Sava River Catchment (SRC), a major transboundary catchment in southeast Europe, with seven monitoring stations along the main river, defining seven nested catchments and seven incremental subcatchments that are analysed and compared in this study. For the relatively large nested catchments (>40,000 km(2)), characteristic regional values emerge for nutrient input per unit area of around 30 T/yr/km(2) for dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) and 2 T/yr/km(2) for total phosphorus (TP). For the smaller nested catchments and incremental subcatchments, corresponding values fluctuate and indicate hotspot areas with total nutrient inputs of 158 T/yr/km(2) for DIN and 13 T/yr/km(2) for TP. The delivered fraction of total nutrient input mass (termed delivery factor) and associated nutrient loads per area are scale-dependent, exhibiting power-law decay with increasing catchment area, with exponents of around 0.2-0.3 for DIN and 0.3-0.5 for TP. For the largest of the nested catchments in the SRC, the delivery factor is around 0.08 for DIN and 0.03 for TP. Overall, the nutrient data for nested catchments within the SRC show consistency with previously reported data for multiple nested catchments within the Baltic Sea Drainage Basin, identifying close nutrient relationships to driving hydroclimatic conditions (runoff for nutrient loads) and socio-economic conditions (population density and farmland share for nutrient concentrations).
|
|
| 9. |
- Vigouroux, Guillaume, 1991-, et al.
(författare)
-
Gap identification in coastal eutrophication research - Scoping review for the Baltic system case
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Science of the Total Environment. - : Elsevier BV. - 0048-9697 .- 1879-1026. ; 839
-
Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Coastal eutrophication is a major issue worldwide, also affecting the Baltic Sea and its coastal waters. Effective management responses to coastal eutrophication require good understanding of the interacting coastal pressures from land, the open sea, and the atmosphere, and associated coastal ecosystem impacts. In this study, we investigate how research on Baltic coastal eutrophication has handled these interactions so far and what key research gaps still remain. We do this through a scoping review, identifying 832 scientific papers with a focus on Baltic coastal eutrophication. These are categorized in terms of study focus, methods, and consideration of coastal system components and land-coast-sea interactions. The coastal component categories include coastal functions (including also socio-economic driver aspects), pressures that are natural (or mediated by a natural process or system) or directly anthropogenic, and management responses.The classification results show that considerably more studies focus on coastal eutrophication pressures (52%) or impacts (39%) than on characterizing the coastal eutrophication itself (20%). Moreover, few studies investigate pressures and impacts together, indicating that feedbacks are understudied. Regarding methods, more studies focus on data collection (62%) than on linking and synthetic methods (44%; e.g., modelling), and very few studies use remote sensing (6%) or participatory (3%) methods. Coastal links with land and open sea are mentioned but much less investigated. Among the coastal functions, studies considering ecological aspects are dominant, but much fewer studies investigate human aspects and the coastal filter function. Among the coastal pressures, studies considering nutrient loads are dominant, but much fewer studies investigate the sources of these loads, especially long-lived legacy sources and possible solutions for their mitigation. Overall, few studies investigate synergies, trade-offs and incentives for various solutions to address cross-scale multi-solution management.
|
|
| 10. |
- Vigouroux, Guillaume, et al.
(författare)
-
Trend correlations for coastal eutrophication and its main local and whole-sea drivers - Application to the Baltic Sea
- 2021
-
Ingår i: Science of the Total Environment. - : Elsevier BV. - 0048-9697 .- 1879-1026. ; 779
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Coastal eutrophication is a major environmental issue worldwide. In the Baltic Sea, eutrophication affects both the coastal waters and the open sea. Various policy frameworks aim to hinder its progress but eutrophication-relevant water quality variables, such as chlorophyll-a concentrations, still exhibit opposite temporal trends in various Baltic Sea marine and coastal waters. In this study, we investigate the temporal-trend linkages of measured water quality variables and their various anthropogenic, climatic and hydrospheric drivers over the period 1990–2020 with focus on the Swedish coastal waters and related marine basins in the Baltic Sea.We find that it is necessary to distinguish more and less isolated coastal waters, based on their water exchanges with the open sea, to capture different coastal eutrophication dynamics. In less isolated coastal waters, eutrophication is primarily related to nitrogen concentrations, while it is more related to phosphorus concentrations in more isolated coastal waters. In the open sea, trends in eutrophication conditions correlate best with trends in climatic and hydrospheric drivers, like wind speed and water salinity, respectively. In the coastal waters, driver signals are more mixed, with considerable influences from anthropogenic land-based nutrient loads and sea-ice cover duration. Summer chlorophyll-a concentration in the open sea stands out as a main change driver of summer chlorophyll-a concentration in less isolated coastal waters. Overall, coastal waters are a melting pot of driver influences over various scales, from local land-based drivers to large-scale total catchment and open sea conditions. The latter in turn depend on long-term integration of pathway-dependent influences from the various coastal parts of the Baltic Sea and their land-based nutrient load drivers, combined with overarching climate conditions and internal feedback loops. As such, our results challenge any unidirectional local source-to-sea paradigm and emphasize a need for concerted local land-catchment and whole-sea measures for robust coastal eutrophication management.
|
|
