SURFACE WATER QUALITY CHANGES OF RIVER REACHES DUE TO URBANIZATION

Laura H. Kusari, University of Prishtina, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Kosovo

Abstract

It is commonly known that urbanization causes significant changes to water quality and quantity. Many catchments in our country are being rapidly modified as a result of the shift from agricultural to urban land use. These changes are even more noticeable in the Sitnica Catchment. The previous agricultural land is being progressively covered by new structures and roads, resulting in an increase of the imperviousness of that area as well as surface run off. In addition, considerable industrial development and surface mining activities are taking place in the area. These changes are in a relation to high population growth rates and rural to urban migration. All these factors are putting enormous stresses to surface waters in this catchment. Furthermore, those rivers are serving as a recipient of all untreated waste waters and end point for organic substances of domestic effluents
Since the water quality monitoring is the first step to establishing environmental protection policies, it is our aim to monitor those rivers and to document the changes in water quality of rivers selected in this research. The chosen rivers are flowing through the same catchment but are characterized with the different gradient of urbanization. The sampling was conducted in periurban and urban river reaches, under stable environmental conditions and the samples were sent to the laboratory of the Hydro Meteorological Institute of Kosovo for the needed analyses.  The main physical- chemical water quality parameters are analyzed in this research, for all river reaches selected.
The results gained by laboratory analyses, indicates that urban river reaches of rivers in this research experience an increase in almost all constituents, but mostly in oxygen demand, conductivity, turbidity, suspended solids and phosphorus. While in the peri urban river reaches the levels of analyzed constituents are relatively low they tend to have much higher values in the urban reaches of the same rivers. Therefore, this research shows that concentrations of nutrients and values of field parameters in urban river reaches are affected b y the urbanization degree of this area.
Therefore, the results indicate that the urbanization is adversely impacting the surface water quality of rivers in this catchment.