Identification of areas suitable for a dam in THE São Lamberto River Basin

Abstract

The containment and infiltration dams have, mainly, a conservationist character in relation to the soils, providing to them, greater irrigation and control of degraded processes. Within this context, and in view of the importance of the São Lamberto river basin to the mesoregion of the North of Minas Gerais and the environmental problems occurring in it, this work aimed to locate and to highlight areas of aptitude to nitrates in this basin. In order to reach the proposed objective, a joint geographic information system environment with a multicriteria analysis was adopted as methodology, being the basis of the study the environmental criteria of accumulated flow, declivity, vegetation cover and soil protection, and type of soil. The aptitude results, in which they were added to the main rural roads and the two most important springs of the basin worked, allowed to easily understand the critical areas, in which 11% of the São Lamberto river basin is under very high capacity for dams and 18 % under high. With the present study it was possible to conclude that, in fact, the environmental criteria are complex to the point that they can not be analyzed separately, as was done in the era of the emergence of nitrates in Brazil, with the methodology employed, not only to the leasing process but also to the dimensioning of these dams and the adoption of future recovery practices.