Water Quality Management of a Natural Resource [Paperback]

Once a purely technical sub-discipline of hydrology, water quality management is now a social and political discipline, with concerns ranging from ensuring adequate health standards to preserving biological diversity and ecosystem integrity. This book goes beyond the technical manuals and specialty publications to provide support and guidance for the everyday decisions made by water-quality managers. Water Quality: Management of a Natural Resource addresses the rarely touched upon social, biophysical, land-use and policy considerations, which reflect the issues that confront managers and decision-makers. In a series of incisive reviews, experts address key topics in modern water resource management and case studies illustrate the successes and failures of past management efforts. Water Quality: Management of a Natural Resource develops and presents a management view requiring an awareness of: the social context of management, new ecological theories, and how policy is implemented in different situations and countries.

Preface vii

Acknowledgements xiii

1 Water quality management: an evolving field for changing values 1

2 History of water quality management: the problem and its science 29

3 Attitudes, goals, and management strategies 45

4 Global water resources and how they are used: the expression of goals and objectives 61

5 Developing standards from the traditions of toxicology 79

6 classification and environmental quality assessment: the search for ecologically accurate aquatic metrics 107

7 The role of scale issues in water quality management 127

8 Water and the hydrologic cycle 143

9 rivers and streams: one-way flow systems 159

10 Groundwater and water quality: water to live on 183

11 Coastal l#;