Impact of potentially contaminated river water on agricultural irrigated soils in an equatorial climate

Juan Manuel Trujillo-González, Juan D. Mahecha-Pulido, Marco Aurelio Torres-Mora, Eric C. Brevik, Saskia D. Keesstra, Raimundo Jiménez-Ballesta*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

32 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Globally, it is estimated that 20 million hectares of arable land are irrigated with water that contains residual contributions from domestic liquids. This potentially poses risks to public health and ecosystems, especially due to heavy metals, which are considered dangerous because of their potential toxicity and persistence in the environment. The Villavicencio region (Colombia) is an equatorial area where rainfall (near 3000 mm/year) and temperature (average 25.6 °C) are high. Soil processes in tropical conditions are fast and react quickly to changing conditions. Soil properties from agricultural fields irrigated with river water polluted by a variety of sources were analysed and compared to non-irrigated control soils. In this study, no physico-chemical alterations were found that gave evidence of a change due to the constant use of river water that contained wastes. This fact may be associated with the climatic factors (temperature and precipitation), which contribute to fast degradation of organic matter and nutrient and contaminants (such as heavy metals) leaching, or to dilution of wastes by the river.

Original languageEnglish
Article number52
JournalAgriculture
Volume7
Issue number7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • Agricultural land use
  • Equatorial area
  • Trace elements
  • Wastewater irrigation

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