Water Quality for Sustainable Development

Dear Colleagues,

Striving to achieve, maintain, and provide reliable access to clean and affordable water is one of the greatest challenges of municipalities across the globe. In the next few decades, over 80% of the world population will be concentrated in urban areas, with the most rapid rates of urbanization expected to occur in developing countries, putting stress on the limited available freshwater resources. Urbanization and agri-food systems located near and within them can also lead to stream degradation and groundwater depletion, if not properly managed. The urban stream syndrome is characterized by symptoms such as flashy hydrology, increased rates of erosion, and degradation of aquatic habitat quality. However, novel urban stormwater management systems have shown promising results that have potential to effectively mitigate the adverse effects of urbanization on streamflow and sediment regimes. Systems that prioritize storage, infiltration, and evapotranspiration should be included, in attempts to prevent significant deterioration of the water budget from pre-development conditions. Additionally, in efforts to reduce the component of the annual sediment load mobilized by larger flood flows, streambed and bank stabilization, as well as stormwater management systems that provide significant controls of peak flows during major storm events, will prove to be most beneficial to restore the health of the ecosystem of urbanizing streams. Therefore, the needs are increasing to attain more effective management strategies that can minimize the risk of water pollution and encourage water recycling to ensure sustainable development. Advanced, real-time water quality monitoring, remote sensing, and new generations of artificial intelligence models designed to accurately simulate different spatial and temporal hydrologic scales have been developed to help water managers with science-informed and timely decision making to more cost-effectively maintain and expand aging urban water infrastructure (including drinking water supply, wastewater collection and treatment, and stormwater management systems) to meet the growing demands of the population through smart monitoring, treatment, recycling, and reuse. This Special Issue entitled “Water Quality for Sustainable Development” of the MDPI journal Water is designed to draw attention to the body of knowledge that aims at providing direction to new research ideas and technological development for smart and resilient cities of the future. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all;
• Protection of urban stream water quality through improved road winter maintenance and road salt management;
• Urban and agri-food water use efficiency, water recycling, and safe reuse technologies;
• Urban stormwater management systems, low-impact development, and bioretention systems;
• Real-time monitoring, remote sensing, and artificial intelligence modeling;
• Aging water infrastructure and asset management;
• Integrated surface and groundwater resource management;
• Urban stream stability, stream water quality, and stream restoration;
• Groundwater modeling and surface water modeling;
• Health of the ecosystem of urban streams, lakes, and wetlands.

Prof. Dr. Bahram Gharabaghi
Dr. Hossein Bonakdari
Prof. Dr. Ed McBean
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.