Non-point pollution of groundwater in urban areas

Within a pilot project, a monitoring network for the description of the non-point sources of groundwater pollution in urban areas was implemented and operated for 3 years. The main concept of the network lay in the collection of consistent series of time data for the description of groundwater quality and the description of the relationship between the non-point sources of anthropogenic pollutants in the urban areas and the measured concentration in groundwater. The impairment of the groundwater quality due to non-point sources of pollution could be demonstrated and described. Supporting information on hydrology, geology and land-use has been used in addition to the measured data. The results show the significant impact of the urban non-point sources on the groundwater quality. In particular, drastically decreasing concentrations of oxygen and increasing concentrations for boron, EDTA and NTA have been observed. The second step of the work focuses on the deduction of rules for the qualification of the influence of land-use on the groundwater quality by means of the decision-tree method. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.