Author : Laura Kusari and Figene Ahmedi

The deterioration of surface water quality is a huge environmental concern in our new country. Recently we are witnessing the changes in land use throughout the country. Catchments modified from mainly agricultural to urban land-use. The River Sitnica Catchment is experiencing those uncontrolled changes even more rapidly. The agricultural land in this catchment is being progressively covered by new structures, mainly houses and roads, resulting in an increase of the imperviousness of that area and consequently the increased surface runoff. In addition, considerable industrial development and surface mining activities are taking place in this area, too. These changes are associated with high population growth rates and migration from other less urbanized areas. All the mentioned factors are imposing enormous stress on the catchment’s rivers. In particular, urban river reaches are experiencing increase of almost all constituents, mostly oxygen demand, conductivity, total suspended solids and phosphorus. Concentrations of nutrients are also higher in those urban river reaches, too. Knowing that sediments are actually the most widespread cause of surface water impairment, than the Total Suspended Solids (TSS) is an important water quality monitoring parameter. The increase of urban, industrial and agricultural discharges into surface waters in this catchment is expected to cause an increase of this constituent, too. The Total Suspended Solids analysis provides an initial and very basic measure for characterization and study of surface water quality. Measuring the TSS in streams is necessary both for monitoring stream quality and for planning management actions for protection. But, since the TSS measurement is relatively expensive and time consuming procedure, especially for our new country, it is the aim of this work to represent a possibility to measure TSS through turbidity, as an easy to measure parameter. In order to know the relationship between turbidity and TSS, the frequent sampling and their laboratory analyses are required. To avoid this, due to time, financial and personnel limitations the new approach is used in this work. The laboratory prepared subsamples will provide the necessary data for the development of turbidity to TSS relationship.

Keywords: urban river reaches, Total Suspended Solids, turbidity, relationship

Article published in International Journal of Current  Engineering  and Technology, Vol.3,No.4(Oct- 2013)