Spatial Distribution and Partition Coefficient of Nutrient in Water and Sediment of Shatt Canal, Iraq

Abstract

The proposed water and sediment quality of Shatt Al-Basrah was assessed by (1) using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) using Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) method for calculating nutrient concentrations of water and sediment samples, (2) evaluating Partition Coefficient (Kd) and cluster analysis for water and sediment samples. The GIS facilitates the explanations of the spatial relationships among key environmental processes. It employs spatial distribution modeling to analyze the nutrient concentrations of Nitrite as N (NO2-N), Nitrate as N (NO3-N), Ammonia as N (NH3-N), Ammonium (NH4), and Sulfate (SO4) in the water and sediment. This paper shows that the results of Partition Coefficient (Kd) is always less than 3 for all sites illustrating that the pollutants are present in liquid phase preferentially which have high solubility and are less sediment-associated.