Correlation assessment and monitoring of the potential pollutants in the surface sediments of Pyeongchang River, Korea

The study provides a baseline for the assessment of the organic and inorganic pollution specially, heavy metal contamination in the surface sediments of Pyeongchang River, South Korea. The assessment of the study areas was done with respect to metal pollution load, ecological risk and geoaccumulated risk. Based upon the used indices, a priority index (P_index) was used to rank the utmost contaminated sites. Though the concentrations of mercury in all sediments were below the guideline, the significant enriched contamination was observed by all applied indices. As expected, the values of pollution load index (PLI), ecological risk index (RI) and geoaccumulation risk index (I_geo) demonstrated lower heavy metal contamination in upstream areas compared to the downstream. Admittedly, sediments were unpolluted to slightly-polluted according to PLI while high to extremely high ecological risks were observed in several sediment samples. Furthermore, all the samples were uncontaminated as per I_geo. After simplification of I_geo, the P_index showed the utmost contaminated sediments with a value of 2.537. Notably, protective measures should be taken to the highly contaminated areas which are prioritized by P_index. Admittedly, the maximum concentrations of total organic carbon, total nitrogen, inorganic nitrogen, total phosphorous, inorganic phosphorous, calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium were significantly observed as 7.8×10⁴, 3,185, 36, 1,032, 3.7, 1,5163, 2,881, 669 and 4,076mg/kg accordingly.