Spatial water quality Assessment of Langat River Basin (Malaysia) using environmetric techniques
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2011
Abstract
This study investigates the spatial water quality pattern of seven stations located along the main Langat River. Environmetric methods, namely, the hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis (HACA), the discriminant analysis (DA), the principal component analysis (PCA), and the factor analysis (FA), were used to study the spatial variations of the most significant water quality variables and to determine the origin of pollution sources. Twenty-three water quality parameters were initially selected and analyzed. Three spatial clusters were formed based on HACA. These clusters are designated as downstream of Langat river, middle stream of Langat river, and upstream of Langat River regions. Forward and backward stepwise DA managed to discriminate six and seven water quality variables, respectively, from the original 23 variables. PCA and FA (varimax functionality) were used to investigate the origin of each water quality variable due to land use activities based on the three clustered regions. Seven principal components (PCs) were obtained with 81% total variation for the high-pollution source (HPS) region, while six PCs with 71% and 79% total variances were obtained for the moderate-pollution source (MPS) and low-pollution source (LPS) regions, respectively. The pollution sources for the HPS and MPS are of anthropogenic sources (industrial, municipal waste, and agricultural runoff). For the LPS region, the domestic and agricultural runoffs are the main sources of pollution. From this study, we can conclude that the application of environmetric methods can reveal meaningful information on the spatial variability of a large and complex river water quality data. © 2010 The Author(s).
Keywords
Cluster analysis, Discriminant analysis, Environmetric, Factor Analysis, Statistical Principal component analysis, Water quality, Anthropogenic sources, Hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis, Malaysia, Municipal waste, Pollution sources, Principal Components, Quality patterns, River basins, River water quality, Spatial cluster, Spatial variability, Spatial variations, Total variance, Total variation, Water quality assessments, Water quality parameters, Agricultural runoff, Pollution, Quality control, River pollution, Rivers, river water, runoff, surface water, anthropogenic source, spatial variation, agricultural waste, article, controlled study, factorial analysis, industrial waste, land use, municipal solid waste, pollution transport, river basin, water analysis, water pollution, water sampling, Environmental Monitoring, Factor Analysis, Statistical, Water Pollutants, Langat River, West Malaysia
Divisions
CHEMISTRY
Publication Title
Environmental Monitoring and Assessment
Volume
173
Issue
1-4
Additional Information
Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science Building, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, MALAYSIA