Indicators of the ecological stress and environmental susceptibility of Keenjhar Lake, Sindh, Pakistan

Abstract

Keenjhar Lake, mega storage of drinking water for the residents of Karachi metropolis, agriculture cultivation and a well‐known recreational place, has been steadily contaminated. This study was aimed to understand the level of pollution and the reasons for a decrease in fish production over the past decade based on the available datasets. Focusing on some heavy metals such as Fe, Zn, Ni, Mn, Cu, Cr, Cd and Pb, beyond limit can cause of human health risk, here we provide a critical review of the previous studies conducted to findout reasonable solutions to cope with rapid environmental changes. A multivariate approach of principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to test the relationships among physicochemical parameters in relation to the heavy metals. The first component PCI revealed 88.09%, variability in the loaded dataset and PCII II 6.05% of the total variations. A cluster analysis was established to delineate heavy metal intensity in the corresponding years. Results indicated that since 2012, there has been a steady increase in heavy metal concentration, which can subsequently pose a significant threat to human health. Therefore, it is emphasized that carcinogenic health effects of such contamination on human health need to be investigated. However, over a decade datasets can solely fill knowledge gaps associated with framework conservation and management strategies.

Indus river estuary: an assessment of potential risk of contaminants and ecosystem susceptibility

“…Concentration over the optimum range of heavy metals induces significant physiologic and biochemical damage to the fish and higher consumers (human) [29,30]. Nevertheless, heavy metal pollution enhances the toxic effects by interfering with fish-protection mechanisms, inducing negative affect on the physiological homeostasis of fish and invertebrates [11,31].…”

“…Some aquatic organism can play vital role in understand ecosystem as they indicate ecosystem health (Parmar [7]; [8] for this purpose macrophytes, microorganisms (phytoplankton and zooplankton), invertebrates, and fish are highly sensitive to the heavy metals pollution [9,10]. A comprahensive review on the Keenjhar lake on the Indus River basin documeneted (Qamer et al [11]).…”

Landscape Metrics Explain the Ecological Susceptibility of Terrestrial Ecosystems

“…Studies at the ecosystem level focus on the susceptibility of aquatic ecosystems to environmental stressors in general and on oceans (Tremblay et al, 2015), lakes (Qamar et al, 2019;Milecka et al, 2020), rivers (Scavia & Liu, 2009;Evans & Scavia, 2013), and gulfs (Brock et al, 2009), in particular. Terrestrial ecosystems have received less attention regarding their ecological susceptibility.…”