Are Diatom-based Indices from Europe Suitable for River Health assessment in China? A Case Study from Taizi River, Northeastern China.
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Date
2014-01
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Abstract
Aims: Diatom-based indices are widely used for river health assessment. Many such
indices were originally developed in European countries based on a specific taxa list of
benthic diatoms. Thus, the transferability of these indices to other rivers and geographic
locations has been questioned.
Design, Place and Duration of Study: In this study, we sampled benthic diatoms in the
Taizi River, a temperate river in northeastern China during May 2009 to evaluate the
applicability of eight commonly used diatom-based indices for assessing the principal
water quality gradient and relationship with different water chemical parameters. Methodology: Sensitivities of the eight indices were evaluated by applying the principle
component analysis (PCA), the box-plot map and multiple comparisons of the Kruskal–
Wallis nonparametric test (K-W test).
Results: The results showed that all eight of the tested indices showed significant
correlations with the principal contamination gradient of both nutrient enrichment and
organic pollution. The contamination gradient was extracted through principal component
analysis and the first three axes explained 40.19%, 18.72%, and 9.77% of the total
variation, respectively.
Conclusion: Our results confirmed that the diatom-based indices did not properly reflect
the current Chinese surface water quality classes. However, these indices showed
consistent trends with chemical parameters that reflected general water quality condition,
such as electric conductivity (EC); organic pollution, as reflected by dissolved oxygen
(DO) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) and nutrient enrichment, as reflected by total
nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP). The results indicated that both BDI and SHE
were the most suitable diatom-based indices among the eight tested indices, although
SPI, DES and ROTT were also suitable for river health assessment in the Taizi River.
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Keywords
Diatom-based index, BDI, river health, OMNIDIA, Taizi River
Citation
Qu Xiaodong, Zhou Ying, Zhao Rui, Bentsen Catherine, Yin Xuwang, Zhang Yuan. Are Diatom-based Indices from Europe Suitable for River Health assessment in China? A Case Study from Taizi River, Northeastern China. British Journal of Environment and Climate Change. 2014 Jan-Mar; 4(1): 95-114.