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Spatial–temporal characteristics of surface water quality in the Taihu Basin, China

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An Erratum to this article was published on 15 June 2011

Abstract

Taihu Basin is one of the most developed and industrialized regions in China. In the last two decades, rapid development of economy as well as an increase in population has resulted in an increase of pollutants produced and discharged into rivers and lakes. Much more attention has been paid on the serious water pollution problems due to high frequency of algal blooming. The dataset, obtained during the period 2001–2002 from the Water Resources Protection Bureau of the Taihu Basin, consisted of eight physicochemical variables surveyed monthly at 22 sampling sites in the Taihu Basin, China. Principal component analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis (CA) were used to identify the characteristics of the surface water quality in the studied area. The temporal and spatial variations of water quality were also evaluated by using the fuzzy synthetic evaluation (FSE) method. PCA extracted the first two principal components (PCs), explaining 86.18% of the total variance of the raw data. Especially, PC1 (73.72%) had strong positive correlation with DO, and was negatively associated with CODMn, COD, BOD, NH4 +–N, TP and TN. PC2 (12.46%) was characterized by pH. CA showed that most sites were highly polluted by industrial and domestic wastewater which contributed significantly to PC1. The sites located in the west of Lake Taihu were influenced by farmland runoff which may contribute to nitrogen pollution of Lake Taihu, whereas the monitoring sites in the eastern of Lake Taihu demonstrated that urban residential subsistence and domestic wastewater are the major contaminants. FSE indicates that there is no obvious variance between 2001 and 2002 among most sites. Only several sites free from point-source pollution appear to exhibit good water quality through the studied period.

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Acknowledgments

The Water Resources Protection Bureau of the Taihu Basin is acknowledged for their permission to use the data. This paper was supported by the Program National 973 project (2008CB418106) and (sklhse-2010-A-01) from State Key Laboratory of Hydro-Science and Engineering and Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University, China. The authors would like to express their thanks to the reviewers for the very valuable comments which greatly improved the quality of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy and Sciences and Ministry of Water Resources, P.O. Box 26, Yangling, 712100, Shannxi, People’s Republic of China

    Guangju Zhao

  2. Department of Hydrology and Water Resources Management, Institute of Natural Resources Conservation, Kiel University, Olshausenstr. 75, 24118, Kiel, Germany

    Guangju Zhao

  3. Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, 210008, People’s Republic of China

    Junfeng Gao

  4. College of Water Resources and Architectural Engineering, Northwest A & F University, Yangling, 712100, People’s Republic of China

    Peng Tian

  5. State Key Laboratory of Hydro-Science and Engineering, Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Kun Tian & Guangheng Ni

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  1. Guangju Zhao
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  2. Junfeng Gao
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Correspondence to Guangju Zhao.

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An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12665-011-1141-6

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Zhao, G., Gao, J., Tian, P. et al. Spatial–temporal characteristics of surface water quality in the Taihu Basin, China. Environ Earth Sci 64, 809–819 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-011-0902-6

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