Effects of Anthropogenic Activities on the Elemental Concentration in Surface Sediment of Oxbows

Abstract

The Upper Tisza floodplain region provides a mosaic of aquatic habitats including a series of oxbows. Inorganic contaminants can accumulate in the sediment; thus, the sediment is good indicator of the contamination of these oxbows. Our aim was to explore the effects of anthropogenic activities on the concentration of elements and also to study the influence of vegetation types on the element in surface sediment of oxbows. We studied eight oxbows: two of them were protected, four of them were used for fishing and two of them were contaminated with domestic sewage. The following elements were measured with MP-AES in surface sediment: Al, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mn, Pb and Zn. The elemental concentration was compared to the toxicity classes of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the assessment of the level of toxicity was based on this comparison. We found that studied oxbows were different from each other based on the elemental concentrations of sediment using canonical discriminant analysis and analysis of variance. Based on the elemental concentration in surface sediment of oxbows, separation was also found among vegetation types. But significant difference was not found in the concentrations of elements based on vegetation types. Our results demonstrated that the anthropogenic activities had remarkable effects on the elemental concentration of surface sediment in oxbows. Our findings suggest that the sediment is useful to assess the effects of anthropogenic activities on elemental concentrations of oxbows.

Assessing the impacts of the main river and anthropogenic use on the degree of metal contamination of oxbow lake sediments (Tisza River Valley, Hungary)

“…The overall tendency of heavy metal enrichment in riparian lake sediments shows the effect of their closer connection with the Tisza. On the other hand, the anthropogenic activities to which oxbows are subjected can also influence sediment metal loads in oxbow lakes (Balogh et al 2016).…”

“…A recent study demonstrated that the frequent flooding of oxbow lakes by polluted rivers was responsible for the accumulation of metals (Cd, Cu, Pb) in their sediments (Ciazela et al 2018). On the other hand, the anthropogenic activity to which oxbows are subjected, such as fishing or sewage discharge, can significantly impact the quality of their sediments in terms of metal enrichment (Balogh et al 2016). Therefore, we hypothesized that oxbow sediments can be enriched in metal pollutants to a variable level depending on the impact of their anthropogenic use and the degree of their connection with the main river.…”

Accumulation of Metals in Juvenile Carp (Cyprinus carpio) Exposed to Sublethal Levels of Iron and Manganese: Survival, Body Weight and Tissue

“…The pollution appeared in oxbows near the river and its effects are detected even nowadays in the sediments [4,5]. Besides the anthropogenic pollution, recent studies have demonstrated that oxbows are highly contaminated by Fe and Mn due to the high elemental concentration of sediment and water in the Upper Tisza region of Hungary which originates from the geochemical background [6]. The average Fe concentration of water was 1.1 mg L −1 while the Mn concentration appeared to be 0.4 mg L −1 in the oxbows [7].…”

The Development of Analytical Methods for the Elemental Determination of Biotic Indicators Present in Aquatic Ecosystems

“…In a previous study in a joint research we found oxbows of the second largest Hungarian river (Tisza) to be contaminated with Fe and Mn [17][18][19]. Ten times of these levels were taken in our experiments since the originally found concentrations proved to be too low for the zooplankton to accumulate.…”