Abstract
To understand the relationship between spatial water quality patterns and changes in land-use/cover types in the Jinghe Oasis, 47 water sampling sites measured in May and October 2015 were divided into six cluster layers using the self-organizing map method, which is based on non-hierarchical k-means classification. The water quality indices included the chemical oxygen demand (COD), biological oxygen demand (BOD), suspended solids (SS), total phosphorus (TP), total nitrogen (TN), ammonia nitrogen (NH3-N), chromaticity (SD), and turbidity (NUT). Data was also collected on the changes in the farmland, forest–grassland, water body, salinized land, and other land types during the wet and dry seasons. Then, we combined these data with the classification results of the GF-1 remote sensing satellite data obtained in May and October 2015 and analyzed the influences of land-use/cover type on water quality for different layers and seasons. The results indicate that Clusters 1 to 3 included monitoring samples from the wet season (May 2015), whereas Clusters 4 to 6 included monitoring samples from the dry season (October 2015). In general, the COD, SS, NUT, TN, and NH3-N values were high around the Ganjia Lake Haloxylon natural conservation area in the southern Ebinur Lake region, east of Ebinur Lake, and around the Kuitun River during the wet season. The SD values around these areas were high. Moreover, high BOD and TP values were mainly concentrated around the Ganjia Lake Haloxylon natural conservation area, as well as the Kuitun River, during the dry season. In the discussion on the relationship between the different water quality parameters and land-use/cover type changes, we determined that farmland, forest–grassland, and salinized land significantly influenced the water quality parameters in the Jinghe Oasis. In addition, the influences of various land-use/cover types on the water quality parameters in the research zone during the different seasons exhibited the following descending order of magnitude: farmland → forest–grassland → salinized land → water body → others. Moreover, their influences were lower during the wet season than the dry season. In conclusion, developing research on the relationship between the spatial framework of the water quality in the Jinghe Oasis and land-use/cover type changes is significant for the time sequence distribution of water quality in arid regions from both theoretical and practical perspectives.
Highlights
Water quality is of great importance to the study of water resources in arid regions
When the average variance values are less than 5% for different clusters, the Davies–Bouldin index (DBI) is low; the corresponding clustering number can be regarded as the best clustering result
This study input the trained weights of the neuron nodes through the K-means cluster analysis, which combined with the DBI to select the clustering number
Summary
Water quality is of great importance to the study of water resources in arid regions. Through runoff or infiltration, will always carry a large amount of pollutants; the spatial allocation of land use/cover changes in drainage basins frequently influences or even endangers water quality frequently through non-point source pollution [6]. Numerous scholars have extensively applied statistical methods to determine the mutual relations between land use/cover changes and water quality in various research zones [11,12,13]. These methods included correlation analysis [14,15], multiple regression [16], and redundancy analysis [17,18]
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