Application of GIS-based multi-criteria analysis for site selection of aquifer recharge with reclaimed water

Abstract

Reclaimed water from small wastewater treatment facilities in the rural areas of the Beira Interior region (Portugal) may constitute an alternative water source for aquifer recharge. A 21-month monitoring period in a constructed wetland treatment system has shown that 21,500 m(3) year(-1) of treated wastewater (reclaimed water) could be used for aquifer recharge. A GIS-based multi-criteria analysis was performed, combining ten thematic maps and economic, environmental and technical criteria, in order to produce a suitability map for the location of sites for reclaimed water infiltration. The areas chosen for aquifer recharge with infiltration basins are mainly composed of anthrosol with more than 1 m deep and fine sand texture, which allows an average infiltration velocity of up to 1 m d(-1). These characteristics will provide a final polishing treatment of the reclaimed water after infiltration (soil aquifer treatment (SAT)), suitable for the removal of the residual load (trace organics, nutrients, heavy metals and pathogens). The risk of groundwater contamination is low since the water table in the anthrosol areas ranges from 10 m to 50 m. Oil the other hand, these depths allow a guaranteed unsaturated area suitable for SAT. An area of 13,944 ha was selected for study, but only 1607 ha are suitable for reclaimed water infiltration. Approximately 1280 m(2) were considered enough to set up 4 infiltration basins to work in flooding and drying cycles. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Application of a GIS Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for the Identification of Intrinsic Suitable Sites in Costa Rica for the Application of Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) through Spreading Methods

“…GIS-MCDA for the identification of MAR suitable sites has been applied to entire countries such as Australia [15] and Spain [16], as well as in many regions of the world, for example in India [17][18][19][20][21][22][23], Iran [24][25][26][27], Jordan [28,29], Portugal [12,30], Tunisia [31,32], and the United States [33,34]. The general process for MAR site suitability analysis proposed in [12] is: problem definition, screening of feasible areas, suitability mapping-including the classification of thematic layers or criteria, standardization, weighting of the criteria and layers overlaying-and sensitivity analysis.…”

“…The soil texture classification used is based on [20,22,30]. As it is shown in Figure 7c, the first class consists of sandy soils as sand (S), loamy sand (LS), and sandy loam (SL) which represent "High" infiltration capacity, thus a value of 1.0 is assigned.…”

“…Several different approaches to classify the suitability of the slope are available in the literature [12,[16][17][18][19][21][22][23][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]41]. The linear function for the standardization of the slope is used in [12,41], all the others use the step-wise function (slope classes).…”

Managed aquifer recharge in farming landscapes using large floods: an opportunity to improve outcomes for the Murray-Darling Basin?

“…Current approaches typically produce qualitative maps of the potential recharge sites in a GIS environment (Hostetler 2007;Helm et al 2009;Smith & Pollock 2010;Pedrero et al 2011). These qualitative approaches are not able to specify how subsurface hydrogeological conditions will respond to the additional storage and changes in the water table.…”

Caracterização de solos residuais para infiltração de efluente de estação de tratamento de esgoto

“…O uso de Sistemas de Informação Geográfica (SIG) pode ser vantajoso para a escolha dos locais mais adequados para a infiltração, uma vez que permite georreferenciar, armazenar e tratar a informação, possibilitando a criação de áreas de exclusão e de potencial utilização por meio de análise multicritério, como observado no estudo de Pedrero et al (2011). A aplicação de SIG têm sido efetuada para avaliar a vulnerabilidade das águas subterrâneas à poluição por nitratos (LAKE et al, 2003), na criação de cartas de aptidão para aplicação de lamas de tratamento de efluentes da pasta do papel na agricultura (RIBEIRO et al, 2010), para identificar a localização de ETE (GEMITZI et al, 2007) e na recarga de aquíferos (KALLALI et al, 2007;PEDRERO et al, 2011).…”