engleski

Small Scale Rivers and their impact on the Danube River Basin

The Danube River Basin, being Europe's second largest river basin, is subject to increasing pressure and serious threats of pollution from agriculture, industry, and cities. The Drava River is the fourth largest Danube tributary. Only 17 % of the total area of the Drava catchment is located in Croatia, but during its flow through Croatia, it receives waters from a couple of significant tributaries, such as Plitvica, Bednja and Mura (National institute, 2014 ; Liska, 2015). In such a vast catchment, as is the Danube catchment, smaller streams and rivers sometimes seem to be overlooked. But if one considers the fact that they make up 70 %–80 % of the total channel length of larger river networks, and they greatly influence downstream sections of these networks, in depth knowledge of the smaller streams and rivers characteristics is very important. They also play a significant part in retaining or transmitting both sediments and nutrients while at the same time they are a home and migration corridor for various aquatic organisms (Wohl, 2017). Climate changes and human activities cause changes of the hydrological regime within the Danube River Basin. This change can be observed in hydrological regime of the small streams and rivers, as well as consequently in a big rivers. The smaller rivers often have torrential flow and there is an imperative for analysis of their hydrological regime. The analysis will be performed on the real case study of river Plitvica in the northwestern part of Croatia.

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