Assessment of physicochemical and bacteriological parameters in the surface water of the Juan Diaz River, Panama

Abstract

Water pollution represents an obstacle to the development of countries since it affects not only the social-economic component but also biodiversity. Little is documented on the state of water quality of the rivers that flow through Panama City, so it is important to be able to determine the degree of contamination whether of natural or anthropogenic origin, in order to take actions that seek to remediate and increase the resilience of wetland ecosystems. For this study, a database of the Ministry of the Environment of Panama of water quality monitoring during the years 2002–2018 from the Juan Díaz River in the Republic of Panama was used. With these data, a space-temporal analysis was carried out to determine significant differences between the study sites using the Kruskal–Wallis Test and between seasons (dry and wet) by means of the Mann–Whitney U Test, and evaluation of the water quality index (WQI). The results indicate that there are significant differences between sites for the parameters of pH, T (°C), conductivity (mS/m), turbidity (NTU), DO (mg/L), BOD5 (mg/L), TS (mg/L), SS (mg/L), DS (mg/L), NO3 (mg/L), PO4 (mg/L), fecal coliforms (CFU/100 mL), T. coliforms (CFU/100 mL) and there are no significant differences between seasons except for the PO4 parameter. Analysing the WQI values, all the stations sampled are in the ranges from 17 (highly polluted) to 88 (acceptable).