Water Quality in Inland Water Bodies: Hostage to the Intensification of Anthropogenic Land Uses

Abstract

Increasing stress due to diminishing freshwater resources around the world has put the world on the brink of extreme water scarcity. Moreover, the declining water quality in the available inland water resources can be attributed to various contaminations of these bodies. In recent decades, nutrient contamination has emerged as a major threat to water quality, and hence, there is need to assess and identify its potential causes. Hence, there is a need to understand the source of these nutrient contaminations in water bodies. This study addresses the extent of such contamination, through Chl-a detection on the water body using Sentinel 2A/B data, and relates it with the land use/land cover in its contributing watershed. It is hypothesized that the intensification of land use patterns—primarily agricultural and urban land uses around the inland water bodies—is potential contributors to this increasing nutrient contamination. To assess this, the paper observes the prevalent land use patterns around four inland water bodies with varied nutrient concentration—from very high to almost negligible values, across South and Southeast Asia. The study concludes that water bodies surrounded by natural land uses are almost free of contamination in comparison with those surrounded by anthropogenic land uses. It also highlights that with increased runoff from anthropogenic land uses, there is an increase in nutrient flow, thereby exponentially causing a drop in water quality in proportion to the size of the water body.