Impact of urbanization on the state of water bodies and adjacent territories

Abstract

The processes of urbanization of the territory of the Russian Federation lead to the growing impact of man-made factors on water bodies, especially in those cases when water bodies are located directly in the centers of urbanization, or in the zones of their influence. For water supply of economic activities, a significant proportion of river runoff is withdrawn, large volumes of untreated or conditionally clean wastewater are discharged into rivers. As a result of these processes, the hydrochemical and hydrological regimes of water bodies in urbanized areas have been greatly changed, which in turn leads to the accumulation of a significant amount of contaminated bottom sediments in water bodies, which negatively affects the quality of water and the general ecological state of water bodies. Since the negative impact of urbanization on water bodies with varying degrees of intensity has been going on for over 100 years, the volumes of contaminated sediments accumulated in water bodies, in some cases, reach critical values. Cleaning up contaminated areas of water bodies can be carried out using various sets of measures. However, the development of such measures can only be based on a detailed survey of water bodies. This paper shows that when carrying out such studies, it is necessary to take into account not only the migration of toxic substances in various adjacent environments, for example, from water to bottom sediments, from soils to plants, but also the effect of these compounds on the entire trophic chain, at the end of which there is a person. At the same time, it is necessary to note that both during the restoration work and during the operation of water bodies, it must be remembered that a water body is a single water ecosystem, a system inextricably linked with the adjacent territories.