Impactos ambientais macroscópicos e qualidade das águas em nascentes de parques municipais em Belo Horizonte-MG

Abstract

The river springs are environmental systems extremely important to the maintenance of hydrological, geomorphological and biological equilibrium. Nevertheless, the fluvial network is highly modified in the metropolitan spaces of Brazil, so the river springs are drained or buried. Even though into the conservation units, the impacts from outside commonly affect the quality of soils and water. This work aims to evaluate the environmental quality of river springs into three urban parks at Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. The adopted methodological procedures verify the conditions of water and of the surrounding area at 79 river springs. It was used microbiological tests to analyze water quality and a macroscopic protocol to the environmental quality. The variation in the test’s answers was too high, showing that the spatial characteristics of the parks have a huge influence in the river springs quality. This conclusion reaffirms the importance of conservation units’ management. Although, some characteristics of the river springs can improve their vulnerability to degradation; it does deserve further works to better explore this theme.