Abstract
Southern Taiwan’s Kenting National Park is a popular retreating place for many domestic and international tourists, with increasing tourist numbers potentially over-burdening the coastal ecosystems. To better understand human impacts, a long-term ecological research program was initiated in 2001 to track water quality at 14 coral reef-abutting sites throughout the park since then. Extracting the data from this 20-year survey, we found that increasing in the nutrient levels during the summer rainy season, together with the drops in salinity led by freshwater inputs (land- & rainfall-derived), was the main impact to coral reef ecosystem of Kenting. Cluster analysis further confirmed the nutrient influx was mainly attributed to the local discharge outlets with dense of villages and hotels at upstream. Therefore, more efforts are needed to input to control tourist number, treat waste water discharge and strengthen land protection facilities.
Highlights
Kenting National Park (KNP) is located at the southernmost tip of Taiwan, and the plethora of beaches and vibrant coral reefs are a draw for myriad domestic and international tourists
The suspended solid (SS), high nutrient loads, and pathogenic bacteria are presumably land-based, entering the ocean via channels or creeks during the May to September rainy season; such runoff can include fertilizers and pesticides used in local agriculture [4]
This is likely because drops in salinity are associated with influx of landbased freshwater, which can carry high nutrient loads
Summary
Kenting National Park (KNP) is located at the southernmost tip of Taiwan, and the plethora of beaches and vibrant coral reefs are a draw for myriad domestic and international tourists. The SS, high nutrient loads, and pathogenic bacteria are presumably land-based, entering the ocean via channels or creeks during the May to September rainy season; such runoff can include fertilizers and pesticides used in local agriculture [4]. Given these threats, KNP initiated a long-term ecological research (LTER) program in 2001, with data collected until 2019. We sought to use multivariate statistical approaches, namely principal components analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis (CA), to uncover relationships among seawater quality parameters across the LTER study sites, sensu [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. The overarching goal was to use this approach to better understand spatio-temporal variation in seawater quality in this ecologically rich bio-region
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