Urbanization and agriculture intensification jointly enlarge the spatial inequality of river water quality

Yuan Li; Wujuan Mi; Li Ji; Qiusheng He; Pingheng Yang; Shulian Xie; Yonghong Bi

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162559

Urbanization and agriculture intensification jointly enlarge the spatial inequality of river water quality

Sci Total Environ. 2023 Jun 20:878:162559. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162559. Epub 2023 Mar 11.

Authors

Yuan Li¹, Wujuan Mi², Li Ji³, Qiusheng He⁴, Pingheng Yang⁵, Shulian Xie⁶, Yonghong Bi⁷

Affiliations

¹ School of Environment and Resources, Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China; State Key Laboratory of Freshwater Ecology and Biotechnology, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430072, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Freshwater Ecology and Biotechnology, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430072, China.
³ School of Environment and Resources, Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China.
⁴ Institute of Intelligent Low Carbon and Control Technology, Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China.
⁵ School of Geographical Sciences, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China.
⁶ School of Life Science, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, Shanxi 030006, China.
⁷ State Key Laboratory of Freshwater Ecology and Biotechnology, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430072, China. Electronic address: biyh@ihb.ac.cn.

PMID: 36907406
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162559

Abstract

Rivers are severely polluted by multiple anthropogenic stressors. An unevenly distributed landscape pattern can aggravate the deterioration of water quality in rivers. Identifying the impacts of landscape patterns on the spatial characteristics of water quality is helpful for river management and water sustainability. Herein we quantified the nationwide water quality degradation in China's rivers and analyzed its responses to spatial patterns of anthropogenic landscapes. The results showed that the spatial patterns of river water quality degradation had a strong spatial inequality and worsened severely in eastern and northern China. The spatial aggregation of agricultural/urban landscape and the water quality degradation exhibits high consistency. Our findings suggested that river water quality would further deteriorate from high spatial aggregation of cities and agricultures, which reminded us that the dispersion of anthropogenic landscape patterns might effectively alleviate water quality pressures.

Keywords: Anthropogenic stressors; Landscape pattern; River ecosystem; Spatial statistics; Water quality management.