Water quality assessment and pollution source apportionment using multivariate statistical techniques: a case study of the Laixi River Basin, China

Identifying potential sources of pollution in tributaries and determining their contribution rates are critical to the treatment of water pollution in main streams. In this paper, we conducted a multivariate statistical analysis on the water quality data of 12 parameters for 3 years (2018–2020) at six sampling sites in the Laixi River to qualitatively identify potential pollution sources and quantitatively calculate the contribution rates to reveal the tributaries’ pollution status. Spatio-temporal cluster analysis (CA) divided 12 months into two parts, corresponding to the lightly polluted season (LPS) and highly polluted season (HPS), and six sampling sites were divided into two regions, corresponding to the lightly polluted region (LPR) and highly polluted region (HPR). Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to determine the potential sources of contamination, identifying four and three potential factors in the LPS and HPS, respectively. The absolute principal component score-multiple linear regression (APCS-MLR) receptor model quantitatively analyzed the contribution rates of identified pollution sources, and the importance of the different pollution sources in LPS can be ranked as domestic sewage and industrial wastewater and breeding pollution (33.80%) > soil weathering (29.02%) > agricultural activities (20.95%) > natural influence (13.03%). HPS can be classified as agricultural cultivation (41.23%), domestic sewage and industrial wastewater and animal waste (33.19%), and natural variations (21.43%). Four potential sources were identified in LPR ranked as rural domestic sewage (31.01%) > agricultural pollution (26.82%) > industrial effluents and free-range livestock and poultry pollution (25.13%) > natural influence (14.82%). Three identified latent pollution sources in HPR were municipal sewage and industrial effluents (37.96%) > agricultural nonpoint sources and livestock and poultry wastewater (33.55%) > natural sources (25.23%). Using multivariate statistical tools to identify and quantify potential pollution sources, managers may be able to enhance water quality in tributary watersheds and develop future management plans.