Design and management of monitoring network for marine interference control in coastal groundwater

Water prevention and protection studies need a deep understanding and knowledge of the dynamic behaviour of the water system, particularly if referred to the groundwater flow with respect to the quality and quantity of the resource. The environmental policy requires periodic and efficacious control of the water resources in order to reduce and avoid, possibly, pollution risks and groundwater degradation damaging the environmental system as well as the human community and antropic activities. Water supply must be protected through a suitable control and right evaluation of the water resource potentiality employing efficient monitoring network and deriving programming and planning tools like liability maps. At the present, monitoring is the methodological instrument targeted to obtain all the information needed to evaluate the water resource health referring to the quantity and quality regime. The paper summarises the logical and methodological path followed in order to project and define a groundwater monitoring system devoted to the control of the salt water pollution due to the marine interference with the coastal acquiferous. The scenarios is located in Southern Italy (Basilicata) along the coast strip in between Bradano and Sinni rivers on the Jonio Sea. The area has strong antropic impact related to the agricultural and zoological activities also supplied by the groundwater resource. In the past, drought periods and frantic wells extraction generated high risk condition for groundwater contamination due to the marine interference with negative effect for the local economic assessment. The design and management of a monitoring network has been developed following three main steps. In the first phase, a Geographic Informative System has been built up in order to store all the data related to the geology, hydrology, hydraulic features, etc., of the study area and collected in a wide number of field points along the coast distributed. Thus, in the successive step, specific criterions have been focused in order to recognise the measurement points describing the monitoring network, the sampling techniques employable in field for the data collection and the data analysis procedures. Finally a “specific” software has been produced to support field data acquisition as well as the monitoring network management to automate storing and outputting data procedures. The software linkage to the GIS will support decision making analyses simulating possible scenarios evaluating the consistence of the groundwater resource with respect to the salting process.