Statistical techniques as investigatory tools for the Evaluation of Water Quality of Freshwater Ecosystems

Abstract

Statistics plays crucial role in every field of mankind. Basic statistical techniques help researchers to design experiments, verify conclusions and systematic interpretations of results in various branches of natural as well as social sciences. Aquatic ecosystems being indispensable part of nature are important for the planet earth and human life. Amongst all the aquatic ecosystems, freshwater ecosystems play vital role in the survival of mankind as well as flora and fauna. Rivers are the most engrossing and multiplex freshwater ecosystem on the earth. Due to increased anthropogenic and natural activities these freshwater resources are getting exploited and becoming vulnerable to pollution. Evaluation of these systems becomes crucial as their hydrology is greatly affected by anthropogenic resources and climatic conditions. Being a developing country, Indian freshwater ecosystems are also getting affected by manmade and climatic changes. In present study River Beas (Punjab region) is taken into consideration being one of the major rivers flowing in India. With increasing anthropogenic activities and climatic changes in recent years, river water quality has become an issue of concern and there is need to incorporate multivariate statistical techniques for analysis of quality of the water. Statistical analysis provides crucial insight of many physico-chemical parameters. For this study The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S), principal component analysis/ factor analysis (PCA/FA) and two way ANOVA were applied that reduced huge data in small valuable data set. Two way analysis of variance (ANOVA) followed by Tukey’s HSD was applied to mean values to evaluate spatio temporal variations in selected water quality parameters. Principal component analysis specified the responsible variables for variations in water quality and included soluble salts, nutrients, organic pollutants and some heavy metals from both natural and anthropogenic sources.