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Updated: Aug 7, 2025

Continuous Instream Monitoring of Nutrients and Sediment in Agricultural Watersheds
Published on: September 26, 2017
Urbanization and agriculture intensification jointly enlarge the spatial inequality of river water quality
1School of Environment and Resources, Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China; State Key Laboratory of Freshwater Ecology and Biotechnology, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430072, China.
Abstract:
Rivers are severely polluted by multiple anthropogenic stressors. An unevenly distributed landscape pattern can aggravate the deterioration of water quality in rivers. Identifying the impacts of landscape patterns on the spatial characteristics of water quality is helpful for river management and water sustainability. Herein we quantified the nationwide water quality degradation in China's rivers and analyzed its responses to spatial patterns of anthropogenic landscapes. The results showed that the spatial patterns of river water quality degradation had a strong spatial inequality and worsened severely in eastern and northern China. The spatial aggregation of agricultural/urban landscape and the water quality degradation exhibits high consistency. Our findings suggested that river water quality would further deteriorate from high spatial aggregation of cities and agricultures, which reminded us that the dispersion of anthropogenic landscape patterns might effectively alleviate water quality pressures.
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