during the croatian homeland war in 1991, the capacitor batteries of the zadar electric powersubstation (ts 110/35 kv) were damaged, resulting in the severe pollution of the soil with polychlorinatedbiphenyls (pcbs). due to porosity of karstic soil pcbs represent great environmental and human health risksthat need some action. the polluted soil was collected and an experimental field was formed...

Iberus gualtieranus gualtieranus is an arid-dwelling land snail that needs to use karstic fissures as refuge in order to survive in arid environments. Karstic fissures are primarily on vertical rocky walls. Because displacement is costly to terrestrial gastropods, it is predictable that this snail will move on vertical substrates near its refuges. However, this species eats primarily phanerogam...

An approach is presented to study the functioning of a karstic massif and assess the adverse effects of the anthropogenic pressure by monitoring some water chemical and physical parameters of its main springs. The approach has been applied to the Sette Comuni Plateau (Veneto Region, Italy) hosting a well developed karstic system, whose aquifer presents high vulnerability and undergoes a relevan...

Climate change may increase the incidence of waterborne diseases due to extreme rainfall events, and consequent microbiological contamination of the water source and supply. As a result of the complexity of the pathways from the surface to the consumer, it is difficult to detect an association between rainfall and human disease. The water supply of a Hungarian city, Miskolc (174,000 inhabitant)...

Correlation and cross-spectral analysis can be applied to the study of karstic aquifers to characterize the transformations in these systems between the input function (precipitation) and the output function (discharge). The parameters that can be deduced are the response time, the distinction between quickflow, intermediate flow and baseflow, and the mean delay. This method offers quantifiable...

[1] The responses of karstic aquifers to storms are often used to obtain information about aquifer geometry. In general, spring hydrographs are a function of both system geometry and recharge. However, the majority of prior work on storm pulses through karst has not studied the effect of recharge on spring hydrographs. To examine the relative importance of geometry and recharge, we break karsti...

Significant land use changes, mainly in the form of changing agricultural practices, are transforming a semi-arid karstic environment in NE Spain that encloses numerous saline lakes (playa lakes), forming a unique habitat. The introduction of irrigation systems in an area characterized by a semiarid climate, closed basin hydrology, and karstic geology of evaporitic sediments, is changing the wa...

Coastal wetlands can have exceptionally large carbon (C) stocks and their protection and restoration would constitute an effective mitigation strategy to climate change. Inclusion of coastal ecosystems in mitigation strategies requires quantification of carbon stocks in order to calculate emissions or sequestration through time. In this study, we quantified the ecosystem C stocks of coastal wet...

Vegetation deterioration and soil loss are the main causes of more precipitation leakages and surface water shortages in degraded karst areas. In order to improve the utilization of water resources in such regions, water storage engineering has been considered; however, site selection and cost associated with the special karstic geological structure have made this difficult. According to the pr...