Assessment of Heavy Metal Contamination in the Sediments of the Shuangtaizi Estuary Using Multivariate Statistical Techniques

ABSTRACT

In order to assess heavy metal pollution of sediment samples collected from Shuangtaizi estuary, contamination factor (CF) and multivariate statistical analyses, including principal component analysis (PCA), cluster analysis (CA) and correlation analysis, are carried out in this paper. CF confirms that Pb, Cu and Hg concentrations are very low and all fall within the range of background, while Zn and Cd demonstrate moderate contamination (in A10, A13, A15, A16 and A17 sites) and very high contamination (in A10, A13, A15 and A17 sites), respectively. The PCA indicates that four significant principal components (PCs) are extracted, explaining 88.959% of total variance, which suggests that Pb, Cu and Zn are mainly associated with organic carbon (OC). The result from CA is consistent with that obtained from PCA, classifying that the heavy metals in two clusters derive from different sources. Correlation analysis supports the conclusions from PCA and CA, elucidating the relationships between heavy metals and particle sizes of the sediments.

KEYWORDS:

• Estuary
• sediment
• heavy metals
• cluster analysis
• principal component analysis

Funding

This work was supported by the Sub-project of Central Sharing Funds for using sea area (2013-348-7), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21276035, 21476034), the Scientific Research Project of Education Department of Liaoning Province (L2013203), the Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province (2014025014), the Science and Technology Foundation for Overseas Chinese Scholars, Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security of China, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (3132016327).