Fecal contamination of water sources is an important water quality issue for agricultural irrigation ponds. Escherichia coli concentrations are commonly used to evaluate recreational and irrigation water quality. We hypothesized that there may exist temporally stable spatial patterns of E. coli concentrations across ponds, meaning that some areas mostly have higher and other areas mostly lower than average concentrations of E. coli To test this hypothesis, we sampled two irrigation ponds in Maryland at nodes of spatial grids biweekly during the summer of 2016. Environmental covariates-temperature, turbidity, conductivity, pH, dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll a, and nutrients-were measured in conjunction with E. coli concentrations. Temporal stability was assessed using mean relative differences between measurements in each location and averaged measurements across ponds. Temporally stable spatial patterns of E. coli concentrations and the majority of environmental covariates were expressed for both ponds. In the pond interior, larger relative mean differences in chlorophyll a corresponded to smaller mean relative differences in E. coli concentrations, with a Spearman's rank correlation coefficient of 0.819. Turbidity and ammonium concentrations were the two other environmental covariates with the largest positive correlations between their location ranks and the E. coli concentration location ranks. Tenfold differences were found between geometric mean E. coli concentrations in locations that were consistently high or consistently low. The existence of temporally stable patterns of E. coli concentrations can affect the results of microbial water quality assessment in ponds and should be accounted for in microbial water quality monitoring design.IMPORTANCE The microbial quality of water in irrigation water sources must be assessed to prevent the spread of microbes that can cause disease in humans because of produce consumption. The microbial quality of irrigation water is evaluated based on concentrations of Escherichia coli as the indicator organism. Given the high spatial and temporal variability of E. coli concentrations in irrigation water sources, recommendations are needed on where and when samples of water have to be taken for microbial analysis. This work demonstrates the presence of a temporally stable spatial pattern in the distributions of E. coli concentrations across irrigation ponds. The ponds studied had zones where E. coli concentrations were mostly higher than average and zones where the concentrations were mostly lower than average over the entire observation period, covering the season when water was used for irrigation. Accounting for the existence of such zones will improve the design and implementation of microbial water quality monitoring.
Keywords: Escherichia coli; food safety; irrigation; microbial water quality.
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