Abstract
The agricultural sector consumes 70% of the available freshwater and is highly dependent on nitrogen fertilizers to ensure the food supply. However, the excessive use of these fertilizers contaminates the groundwater, ultimately causing hazards to human health. The excessive use of fertilizer and pesticides leads to salinity or soil sickness. Heavy metal accumulation may lead to eutrophication in water bodies resulting into increased concentration of the greenhouse gases. More than half of the nitrogen applied to cropland is lost to the environment, where it enriches the surface water with nutrients for decades and also can contaminate freshwater aquifers. Water bodies with such a high nutrient load promote the growth of aquatic plants while promoting algal cluster growth, degrading water quality, generating a foul odor, discoloration, and the death of phytoplankton and macrophytes. The other contaminants include organic fertilizers and debris such as animal and plant decays, inorganic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, and irrigation residues, i.e., salts and metals, which affect the groundwater quality. These agricultural contaminants directly affect groundwater through the aquifer biogeochemistry by modifying the concentration of major inorganic contaminants, such as N2, SO4−2, NO3, C, K, Mg, Ca, H+, Cl, P, C, K, Ca, Sr, Ba, Ra, and a range of other fertilizers and pesticides. The chemical, isotopic, and environmental tracer-based analytical methods have been employed in the literature to study the changing inputs from subsequent modifications as sources of concentration gradients in groundwater for various agriculture based contaminants. This manuscript has discussed detailed literature to present different agricultural contaminants and their contribution to groundwater pollution. The manuscript will help understand the current status of agricultural based contaminants in groundwater and and applying remediation measures in field conditions.
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Singh, P., Raj, A., Yadav, B. (2022). Impacts of Agriculture-Based Contaminants on Groundwater Quality. In: Yadav, B., Mohanty, M.P., Pandey, A., Singh, V.P., Singh, R.D. (eds) Sustainability of Water Resources. Water Science and Technology Library, vol 116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13467-8_16
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