Making clear of the background values of different watersheds is an important mission for water resource management and assessment. The background values of the virgin forested watershed with less human activities sometimes have high COD values. In order to investigate this issue, this study take the Tangwang River watershed as a study case, analyzing the monitoring data of COD, BOD, and DO from the year of 2014 to 2018, and taking the water samples in the wet, normal, and dry season of 2019 to make clear the relationships between COD and DOM, the composition, and source of DOM. The non-degradation and terrigenous source DOM contributed to the most of COD values through the fitting analysis. The DOM in the Tangwang River mostly consisted of the humic-like acid and fulvic-like acid. Along with the river, the concentration of DOM had a little decrease, but the composition of DOM did not change obviously, so that the DOM coming from the virgin forest did not degrade in the river, and the river water only had the dilution effect with the tributaries fed in spatially. The organic matters in the virgin forest were easily washed away, so that the DOM concentration had an increase in the wet season temporally. The background COD values of the small virgin forested watershed were usually high as for the leaching effects of the organic matters from the forest, which was worthy noted when conducting the management project of this kind of watershed, in order to adjust measures to local conditions.
Keywords: Background value; COD; DOM; Forested watershed.
© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.