Browsing by Author "Tsegaye, Tsion"

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    Assesment of Soil and Water Contamination Due to Large Scale Floriculture Farming Around Lake Ziway
    (Addis Ababa University, 2015-05-31) Tsegaye, Tsion; Asrat, Asfawossen (PhD)
    The main environmental risk of the floricultural production is associated with the extensive use of pesticides and herbicides and the fate of their residues in the soil and water. An intensive use of agrochemicals is taking place in a context of weak and un-harmonized regulations. Nevertheless, the potential of the residues from the horticulture and floriculture systems on surface water resources, particularly Lake Ziway, the freshest water lake; on the top of that, floriculture industries located at the shore discharging untreated effluent directly in to the lake; Both the small scale and large scale floriculture and horticulture farms lack adequately trained personnel for appropriate pesticides management and appropriate organization setup. Moreover, local communities and producers seem to remain largely unaware of the advantages of sustainable management of natural resources leads to environmental degradation such as land, water and soil quality degradations. Therefore, this study was proposed with the objective of assessing the impact of floriculture industries on the soil water quality of the area. The necessary data are collected by direct physical site observation and assessing existing situation of the study area and by taking sample from the soil and lake adjacent to the farms. a total of eight samples were collected, and each has four sampling points; four sampling points, Eight parameters were analyzed for the water samples (pH, electrical conductivity (EC), Nitrate (No3-N), reactive phosphate (PO4), Biological oxygen demand (BOD), and chemical oxygen demand (COD), Sulfate (SO4), Total ammonia (T-NH3).in addition to this, the soil samples have been analyzed with five parameters ,( pH, CEC, EC, Phosphorus (P) and total Nitrogen (TN)) for the soil SS4 were chosen as a control sample which is relatively few meters far from the farm effluent. The results showed higher levels of TDS (292 to 1116), EC (507 to 1874), PH (7.97to 7.82), COD (291.2 to348.4) BOD (500 to 900) NO3-(1.09to 12.45) andPO43-(0.09 to 0.57) at the impaired sites where the effluent was directly discharged without treatment the concentrations also showed a very high increment when compared with the previous study results. And the same is true for the soils, EC(307to8780),PH,( 6.48to10.53)P(5.02to29),OC,( 0.41 to7.17) also has a great difference when compared with the control sites. . In addition to this, both the soil and water results were also compared with quality guidelines and standards, EPA, WHO, FAO to check if the concentrations of these parameters were within the permissible limits. The identified environmental impacts are water resource utilization, water and soil quality degradation, and land cover changes