The role of technology in a holistic approach for water quality conservation in basins: the Lerma-Chapala case.

Water quality conservation in river basins calls for a useful decision support tool as well as a holistic approach in which the development and application of appropiate technology plays an important role in adequately understanding the natural processess involved. In this paper, the experiences in a major Mexican watershed are presented. Data analysis, experimental work, and modeling are applied to create a reasonable approach to describing water pollution and predicting the behavior of contaminants in the Lerma-Chapala basin, Mexico. The main difficulty in the formulation of different models was identifying the required independent parameters. Interaction parameters between water and sediment phases played a predominant role in the pollutant transport processes. Therefore, the modeling approach included not only water but other phases involved in the migration of pollutants (water, soil, suspended sediments, bottom sediments, atmosphere).