Assessment of spatio-temporal variations of surface water quality and prioritization of pollution Sources (case Study: Talar Watershed, Mazandaran province)

In this study, spatio-temporal variations and prioritization of pollutionsources of 12 surface water quality parameters in talar watershed, iran werestudied at six stations during 2003-2011 using one-way anova, principalcomponent analysis (pca), cluster analysis (ca) and analytic hierarchyprocess (ahp) techniques. the results of one-way anova showed thatspatio-temporal variations had significant influences on water qualityparameters in the study area. we observed that surface water qualityparameters increased during 2003-2011 and khatirkuh-doab station had themaximum value and polshahpour had the minimum value of surface waterquality parameters. pca results indicated that the first three components atkiakola, polshahpour, polsefied-talar and paland stations; the first twocomponents at shirgah-talar station; the first four components at khatirkuh-doab station (with the exception of the year 2006-2007 with one firstcomponent) first two components, explained spatio-temporal variation ofsurface water quality parameters. ca results also showed that kiakola andshirgah-talar stations are placed in the first cluster, polshahpour and palandstations are set in the second cluster, khatirkuh-doab station is put in thethird cluster and polsefied-talar station is located in the fourth cluster. theresults of ahp showed that among pollution sources (lithology, land usechange, land use type and mining of river bed) of surface water quality in thiswatershed, lithology and mining of river bed had the maximum and minimumimpact on surface water quality, respectively.