Water Quality and Pollution Assessment

Water quality and pollution assessment examines how physical, chemical, and biological properties of freshwater systems change across space and time, and what drives those changes — from agricultural runoff and urban expansion to natural geological processes. Researchers use tools like principal component analysis and chemometric methods to untangle overlapping pollution sources that would otherwise be impossible to separate from raw monitoring data, translating complex datasets into actionable water quality indices that regulators and communities can apply directly. A persistent challenge is understanding how land use shifts — particularly rapid urbanization in data-scarce regions — alter both surface water and groundwater simultaneously, since the two systems interact in ways that single-medium studies tend to miss. Active work is pushing toward finer-grained spatial and temporal sampling designs and integrated models that can attribute observed contamination to specific sources with enough confidence to inform policy.

Works

104,457

Total citations

884,956

Keywords

Multivariate Statistical TechniquesWater Quality IndexSpatial and Temporal VariationsLand Use ImpactPrincipal Component AnalysisGroundwater Quality Assessment