Coastal regionalization with self-organizing maps-Water quality variables applied to cluster formation

Abstract

Human sewage disposal can interfere with water quality and thus diminish the ecosystem services provision, including Phytoplankton lifespan. Understanding the role played by sewage disposal in water quality can be useful not only for tourism planning but also for characterizing beaches based on water quality using secondary data and avoiding the costs of sampling and monitoring. The objectives of this paper were to understand the water quality behavior at several small bays in a coastal city of Brazil and to test the use of self-organizing maps in forming clusters similar to those derived from geomorphology and to understand how representative these maps were of the water quality of the whole city. According to our results, self-organizing maps showed similar behavior to geomorphological processes, confirm the hypothesis of cluster formation due to quality and also presented a new pattern of data variation related to seasonality that was not noticed before in the sampling.