A Comprehensive Method for Water Environment Assessment considering Trends of Water Quality

• Published in: Advances in Civil Engineering Vol. 2021; no. 1
• Main Authors: Bi, Sheng, Wang, Li, Li, Yongrong, Zhang, Zhenping, Wang, Zhimian, Ding, Xiaoling, Zhou, Jianzhong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Hindawi 2021; John Wiley & Sons, Inc; Wiley
• Subjects: Analysis; China; Civil engineering; Correlation analysis; Datasets; Environmental management; Freshwater resources; Management; Methods; Pollution; Pollution control; Pollution index; Principal components analysis; Quality assessment; Quality standards; Random variables; Rankings; Reservoirs; Rivers; Trends; Tributaries; Water; Water pollution; Water quality; Water quality assessments; China
• ISSN: 1687-8086; 1687-8094
• DOI: 10.1155/2021/5548113

Water quality is a significant issue, and its assessment plays an important role in environmental management and pollution control. In this paper, we proposed a comprehensive water quality assessment method which takes into account both absolute and temporal trends in water quality. As the first step, we derived and applied a comprehensive pollution index (CPI) to characterize water pollution in 16 major tributaries to the Danjiangkou Reservoir, located in the upper reaches of the Hanjiang River in China. Next, we used Spearman’s rank correlation analysis to quantify temporal CPI trends in each tributary. As the final step, we conducted principal component analysis (PCA) using data on 8 water quality parameters and the temporal CPI trend from each of the 16 tributaries. The resultant comprehensive water quality assessment method identified tributaries, which stand to improve and threaten water quality in the Danjiangkou Reservoir from both immediate and future perspectives.