Solid Waste Disposal on Inland Water Wetlands

Generation of solid waste precedes the surge of urbanization. The earliest waste dumping is recorded in Greece as early as 500 BCE, the conservancy workers in France, wastewater treatment in London, and aqueduct systems in oriental civilizations. The magnitude of waste has been compounding annually with the rise of global population, urbanization, and economic growth. Waste has been overtly and irresponsibly dumped in inland water bodies and the wetlands around it causing inherent damage to the fluvial, pond, or riverine ecosystems. The United Nations has declared this decade to be for ecosystem restoration, and hence, this chapter intends to ponder and establish the concerns of health, species modification, ecosystem endangering, pollution of the surface and subsurface water, impact on the vegetation along the water stretches, to name a few. The objective of this chapter is to evaluate the impact on the ecospheres while arriving at sustainable restoration options.

Water Pollution of Wetlands

Pollution has become a matter of grave concern at present with all the components of the environment laden with pollutants largely from anthropogenic sources and unplanned urbanization. Inland wetlands are very delicate ecosystems and encompass a variety of water bodies, namely ponds, rivers, swamps, etc. They house some unique floristic patterns that are crucial in the primary productivity and maintaining a balance of the wetland ecosystem. In addition to it, the inland water bodies are also productive and are of immense importance to humans. The inland wetlands are also an integral part of boosting the economy of the region as they support a number of industries including fishing and recreation. Thus pollution of water bodies has impacted the human race in a deleterious manner. This chapter is an attempt to overview the inland water bodies, their biodiversity pattern, pollution, and their effect on flora at large.

ICESat-2 Reservoir Applications: A case study from the largest man-made reservoir in India

Monitoring inland water levels is crucial for understanding hydrological processes to climate change impact leading to policy implementation. Satellite altimetry has proved to be an excellent technique to precisely measure water levels of rivers, lakes, and other inland water bodies. The ATL13 product of ICESat-2 space-borne LiDAR is solely dedicated to inland water bodies. The water surface heights were derived from ICESat-2's strong beams, and performance was assessed with respect to reservoir gauge observations. Statistical measurements were used to understand the agreement (R2= 0.99, %RMSE=0.08) among the datasets. An R2 value of 0.99 was observed between ICESat-2 derived water level anomaly and the reservoir storage anomaly. This study provides a unique opportunity to utilize the ATL13 data product to study reservoir water level variation and estimate the reservoir's storage. The methodology can also be helpful to understand the reservoir storage variation in a data-sparse region.

A Review of the Migration and Transformation of Microplastics in Inland Water Systems

Plastic productions continue to grow, and improper management of plastic wastes has raised increasing concerns. This reflects the need to explore the microplastics in water bodies. Microplastics have been regarded as emerging pollutants in water systems. In recent years, large numbers of studies across the world were conducted to investigate the distribution, behavior and the integrated impacts of microplastics in both the marine environment and the freshwater environment. Compared with the marine environment, the migration and transformation of microplastics in inland water systems seem more informative as they may reach the marine environment as one of their final destinations. Based on the updated literature, this review aims at overviewing the migration and transformation processes/behavior of microplastics in rivers, lakes and reservoirs. As for the migration, the microplastics’ fate is from manufacturing, consuming, discarding to migrating and returning to the human society which could form a closed though complicated circle. For transformation, microplastics experience five stages of their fate in inland water systems. These include changing into suspending pieces; ending up deposited as the sediment; resuspending under various changing conditions; ending up via burying into the soil as the part of the riverbed; reaching the marine environment; and being ingested by organisms and also becoming entangled with aquatic plants, etc. It is highly expected that this review can provide a valuable reference for better understanding microplastics’ migration and transformation mechanisms and a guide for the future study of microplastics in an inland water environment.

Ship concept for cleaning the navigable inland water of floating debris

Rivers like the Danube crossing many countries gather floating debris. These countless times block locks, access roads to ports, access walkways on the berths of passenger ships and more. The paper presents the studies carried out in order to design a ship for the collection of these floating debris. Several variants have been chosen, of which one will be presented that is optimal from the point of view of the propulsion installation and especially of the wave front that it produces during the operation of waste collection and navigation to the place of unloading. In order to optimize the shapes of the ship, the NUMECA calculation program was used. It provides important data on the wavefront produced by the ship.