Special Issue "Feature Papers"

Water (ISSN 2073-4441) is an international and cross-disciplinary scholarly journal on water science and technology, including the ecology and management of water resources.

Submission

All papers should be submitted to water@mdpi.com. To be published continuously until the deadline and papers will be listed together at the special issue website.

Submitted papers should not have been published nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere. All papers are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Water is a new international, peer-reviewed, quarterly open access journal published by MDPI.

Open Access publication is free of charge for manuscripts submitted in 2009 and 2010, and published in the first few issues of Water. English correction fees and/or formatting fees of 250 CHF will be billed in certain cases (250 CHF per paper for those papers that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections).

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Environmental Risk Imposed by Diverted Flood Waters on Water and Soils in Emergency Retention Basins
Authors: Lindenschmidt K.-E. and Baborowski M.
Affiliation: Manitoba Water Stewardship, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; E-mail: Karl-Erich.Lindenschmidt@gov.mb.ca
Abstract: Emergency retention basins (ERB) are diked enclosures alongside rivers into which water from the main river channel is diverted during extreme floods. If the basins are operated during extreme flooding, two negative environmental impacts may occur: (i) contamination of the soils due to their transport by suspended sediments to the basin and (ii) depletion of dissolved oxygen in the basin water. A computer-based methodology is presented which was used to assess the environmental risk exhibited by the operation of an ERB system proposed for the Elbe River in Germany. The August 2002 extreme flood event was used as a test case. For such a flood, the results show that there is a 77% risk that dissolved oxygen levels fall below 2 mg/L in the water and a 48% chance of exceeding the inspection value of 500 mg zinc/kg in the soil.