A Systematic Review on the Influence of Drainage Systems on the Environment

Environmental research has become increasingly important due to the human impact on ecosystems, with a particular need to study how different drainage systems affect water quality. Improperly functioning drainage can result in significant losses of biogenic substances, soil erosion, eutrophication, and declining biological capacity. This study addresses the existing knowledge gap by consolidating and critically analyzing the recent scientific literature on controlled and free draining types over forty years (1986–2024) using the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The objective of this systematic review is to collect and summarize information on various drainage systems, their advantages and disadvantages, and their effect on environmental water quality. A review of 144 selected papers from the past four decades indicates that the installation, use, and upgrading of drainage systems remains a subject of extensive debate within the scientific community, particularly regarding their impact on the leaching of biogenic substances into open water bodies. The results obtained from this study indicate that nitrogen (N) (found in 54 papers) and phosphorus (P) (found in 48 papers) are the primary biogenic elements affecting aquatic ecosystems and eutrophication processes. Also, compared to mathematical tools (found in 42 articles), there is a lack of application of AI tools for modeling and predicting the impact of drainage systems on water quality and climate change. Consequently, ongoing research in this area is crucial, offering researchers, practitioners, and wild society with significant insights into the overall effect of drainage on the environment, opportunities for improvement and unexplored research directions for drainage systems.