Urbanization and agriculture intensification jointly enlarge the spatial inequality of river water quality

Rivers are severely polluted by multiple anthropogenic stressors. An unevenly distributed landscape pattern can aggra-vate the deterioration of water quality in rivers. Identifying the impacts of landscape patterns on the spatial character-istics 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 wors-ened 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 deterio-rate from high spatial aggregation of cities and agricultures, which reminded us that the dispersion of anthropogenic landscape patterns might effectively alleviate water quality pressures.

Automated summary

Rivers in China are heavily polluted due to various human activities, and an uneven distribution of landscape patterns worsens the water quality. Studying the relationship between landscape patterns and water quality degradation is important for river management and water sustainability.