Assessment of temporal and spatial water quality in international Gomishan Lagoon, Iran, using multivariate analysis.

Coastal lagoon ecosystems are vulnerable to eutrophication, which leads to the accumulation of nutrients from the surrounding watershed over the long term. However, there is a lack of information about methods that could accurate quantify this problem in rapidly developed countries. Therefore, various statistical methods such as cluster analysis (CA), principal component analysis (PCA), partial least square (PLS), principal component regression (PCR), and ordinary least squares regression (OLS) were used in this study to estimate total organic matter content in sediments (TOM) using other parameters such as temperature, dissolved oxygen (DO), pH, electrical conductivity (EC), nitrite (NO), nitrate (NO), biological oxygen demand (BOD), phosphate (PO), total phosphorus (TP), salinity, and water depth along a 3-km transect in the Gomishan Lagoon (Iran).