Abstract
Freshwater lakes play a vital role in global hydrological and biogeochemical cycles, serving various functions and maintaining ecological balance. However, freshwater resources are more vulnerable to deterioration due to multiple stressors. Gaoyou Lake is one of the impounded lakes of the Eastern route of South-to-North Water Diversion Project in China, and as an important source of drinking water, the lake has been routinely monitored. Long-term monitoring of water quality in Gaoyou Lake showed that concentrations of nutrients and chlorophyll a as well as trophic state in the water column increased while water transparency decreased, indicating that the water quality has declined during the last 12 years. Specifically, there was a notable and statistically significant increase in chlorophyll a concentrations, averaging an annual rate of 9.9%. Despite a slight decline in trophic level index until 2014, subsequent years saw an upward trend, ranging from 50.7 to 56.4 and indicating a light eutrophic state. Spatially, the western area displayed higher nutrient and chlorophyll a concentrations. Changes in hydro-meteorological variables and nutrients from inflowing rivers were the main factors correlated with water quality in Gaoyou Lake. Thus, pollution source apportionment and management within Huaihe River basin should be considered to reduce the external loadings of nutrients in order to improve and sustain long-term water quality.
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Data availability
The datasets are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request but are not publicly available.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Professor Richard K. Johnson for linguistic assistance.
Funding
This study was financially supported by the Water Conservancy Science and Technology Program of Jiangsu Province (2022068, 2021037), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32371638), the Key Laboratory of Lake and Watershed Science for Water Security (NKL2023-ZD02), and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of Chinese Academy of Sciences (2020316).
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You Zhang: conceptualization; data curation; formal analysis; funding acquisition; methodology; software; writing—original draft. Mingyuan Gao: data curation. Rongkun Liu: data curation; formal analysis. Ping Cai: data curation. Junfeng Gao: data curation. Kuanyi Li: writing—review and editing. Yongjiu Cai: conceptualization; funding acquisition; writing—review and editing.
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Zhang, Y., Gao, M., Liu, R. et al. Hydro-meteorological factors and inflowing nutrients drive water quality in an impounded lake of China’s South-to-North Water Diversion Project. Environ Sci Pollut Res 31, 28198–28209 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-33028-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-33028-z