Abstract
It has been widely accepted that there is a close relationship between the land use type and water quality. There have been some researches on this relationship from the perspective of the spatial configuration of land use in recent years. This study aims to analyze the influence of various land use types on the water quality within the Chaohu Lake Basin based on the water quality monitoring data and RS data from 2000 to 2008, with the small watershed as the basic unit of analysis. The results indicated that there was significant negative correlation between forest land and grassland and the water pollution, and the built-up area had negative impacts on the water quality, while the influence of the cultivated land on the water quality was very complex. Besides, the impacts of the landscape diversity on the indicators of water quality within the watershed were also analyzed, the result of which indicated there was a significant negative relationship between them. The results can provide important scientific reference for the local land use optimization and water pollution control and guidance for the formulation of policies to coordinate the exploitation and protection of the water resource.
Highlights
The land use within the watershed has great impacts on the water quality of rivers
The researchers have started to study the linkage between land cover and the river water quality in order to investigate the effects of morphological features of watersheds on the turbidity, dissolved oxygen and temperature of the river water since the early 1960s [7]
Studying the relationship between the proportion of land use types and water quality in the Chaohu Lake Basin in this study indicated that built-up land was generally positively related to the indicators of water quality, and the forest land and grass land and water area were negatively related with the water quality variables, while the influence of the cultivated land on the water quality was very complex
Summary
The land use within the watershed has great impacts on the water quality of rivers. The water quality of rivers may degrade due to the changes in the land cover patterns within the watershed as human activities increase [1, 2]. There have been three waves of the research that tried to reveal the effects of the land use and land cover change on the quality of surface water [5, 6]. The researchers have started to study the linkage between land cover and the river water quality in order to investigate the effects of morphological features of watersheds on the turbidity, dissolved oxygen and temperature of the river water since the early 1960s [7]. The third wave of these studies have started to take advantage of the remote sensing, GIS, and multivariate analysis to explore the influence of the land cover on the suspended sediment, nutrients and ecological integrity of the stream [9,10,11,12,13,14]
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