“…However, most WQIs have been developed for general water purposes, such as Horton's Index, the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF) Index, the British Columbia Water Quality Index, the Oregon Water Quality Index, the Overall Index of Pollution, the River Pollution Index (RPI), and the Universal Water Quality Index (Liou et al 2004). Only a few WQIs have been developed based on specific water-use purposes, such as the water supply or drinking water (Mohebbi et al 2013;Wanda et al 2012;Ramesh et al 2010), recreation or water sports (Smith and Daviescolley 1992;Anderson et al 2012;Kamizoulis and Saliba 2004;Marino et al 1995;Nagels et al 2001), public bathing (Smith et al 1991;Kamizoulis and Saliba 2004;Kay 1988), estuaries or coastal water systems (Garcia-Marin et al 2013;Neto et al 2013), irrigation or agriculture (Goss and Richards 2008;Herricks and Suen 2006;Al-Bassam and Ai-Rumikhani 2003;Wang et al 2011), livestock (Gharibi et al 2012), and marine shrimp culture (Ferreira et al 2011). Many government agencies have applied WQI to develop their own standards for various water purposes, which differ with regard to the specific terms used for the classification schemes and in the selection of indicator parameters (Bordalo et al 2006;Sarkar and Abbasi 2006;Suen and Herricks 2009;Bordalo et al 2001).…”