The territorial area (basin) that provides the water resource to the abstraction point is subject to complex hydrological processes (conditioned by climate, topography, vegetation, nature and uses of the soil, subsoil rocks, etc.), changeable in space and time, which must be monitored to establish the cause-effect relationship of these processes with the quantity-quality of the resource and its temporal distribution. It is a matter of having criteria, based on evidence, that allow the territory of the basin to be managed in such a way as to protect the resource, as a guarantee of availability for supply in the face of the scenarios that climate change may bring (low water periods and drought situations). We talk about water from the adaptive management of the territory. We start from the premise that not only climate change affects the resource, but that changes in land use/management can aggravate or reduce the negative effects. Hence the need to plan this territory from its hydrological function.
In the LIFE URBASO project, a monitoring network has been established in active surface water abstraction points, from Bakio to Markina. Once appropriate protocols were established to homogenize these tasks, continuous recording devices have been installed that measure (since 2021), every 10 or 20 minutes, different parameters. These report on the quantity of the resource (height of water), its nature (electrical conductivity) and environmental conditions (temperature, turbidity). The data series generated provide information on the responses, which change throughout the year, of the catchment to different atmospheric situations (rain fronts, lack of rainfall, etc.) and soil alterations (forestry activity in the cases under study). Additionally, weekly water samples are collected for subsequent laboratory analysis. On one hand, suspended solids are measured, as they are directly related to the turbidity of raw water. Likewise, dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and its quality are analyzed using excitation-emission fluorescence matrices (EEM), as they are directly linked to the formation of disinfection by-products.
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