# About Cikapundung

# About Cikapundung

Here's some of our discussion on "Research Gate" combined with what we have talked about in our lab. It's about methods to quantify water processes in a river stream.

Question: how can I calculate anthropogenic impact in river stream?

Respond no 1: I think you need to take a whole watershed approach. Identify the point you are interesting in analyzing or where you have available data, then find the watershed for that point, then see what your point sources and non-point sources are, then try to quantify those. This is a challenging problem.

Respond no 2:

you need to find out concentrations and the areas areas (or watershed) with pristine water (related to your elements of interest) and to define downstream possible sources (watershed areas or point sources). Water well/river data together with information about the local antropogenic/possible geological element sources should help to find out if its a natural or an impacted change of the specific element concentration. Depending on the area also mountain run off or groundwater influx into the river may be part of your estimation. 

It could help to use other elements/organics that are clearly linked to anthropogenic impacts to find possible source areas.

Respond no 3:

If you only have basic major ion data this task will be hard, but you can still do some groundwork. What are the possibilities of anthro inputs? i.e. what chemicals? you could focus on a few known anthropogenic chemicals, such as fertilizers. However, if your catchment includes carbonate and silicate bedrock, it will be hard to tease out diffuse anthro inputs because signals will be mixed. If you have the time to collect more data and money for analyses, you could look at trace elements like lithium, boron and bromide. Lithium is very good for comparing carbonate and silicate inputs, and if you have money for lithium isotope analyses you can get a good picture of different weathering processes. Also, have you tried PHREEQC for calculating your CO2 consumption?

Dasapta Erwin Irawan 

Applied Geology Research Division

Faculty of Earth Sci. & Tech.

Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia

{@d_erwin_irawan}