Abstract
Despite the significant impacts of natural factors such as rainfall, topography, soil type, and river network as well as agricultural activities on the environmental water quality, little is known about the influence of their temporal and spatial variations in a fluvial-lacustrine watershed. In this study, a whole process accounting method based the export coefficient model (WP-ECM) was first developed to quantify how natural factors and agricultural activities distribution influenced water quality. A case study was performed in a typical fluvial-lacustrine area — Dongting basin, China. The simulated results indicated that the natural factors can promote and inhibit the migration and transformation of agricultural pollutants generated from the watershed and the spatial distribution of the natural factors displayed high variability. It should be priority to monitor the areas with greater natural impact in the basin. Moreover, the cultivated land area and the number of pig-breeding were positively correlated with the pollutant discharge. From the perspective of the spatial distribution of comprehensive influence, the comprehensive high-impact areas are mainly distributed in the Dongting Lake district in 2005–2010 and in Xiang River watershed in 2010–2020. A key strategy for controlling or reducing the cultivated land area and the intensity of livestock breeding in these high-impacts areas is recommended to reduce the impact of the environmental water quality for the entire basin.
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Data availability
The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Hunan Province Ecological Environment Monitoring Center and the State Environmental Protection Scientific Observation and Research Station for Lake Dongting for the water quality data in the manuscript.
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This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Project (No. 2021YFC3201003).
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Yu Feng: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, data curation, writing — original draft, writing — review and editing, visualization, project administration. Binghui Zheng: resources, supervision. Haifeng Jia: reviewing and editing. Bing-bing Song: data curation. Yang Liu: writing — reviewing and editing. Jun-ping Bi: resources.
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Feng, Y., Zheng, BH., Jia, HF. et al. The impacts of spatio-temporal variation of natural and agricultural influences on the environmental water quality in a fluvial-lacustrine watershed in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 76387–76404 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-27978-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-27978-z