Water quality assessment at Fraser’s hill and Pangkor Island, Malaysia using physico-chemical and biological methods

Abstract

Water bodies are an indispensable part of human life where their quality determine human life. Monitoring the water quality in terms of water temperature, dissolved minerals and amount of bacteria present in the water is essential for healthy life. Beetle has been used as an indicator of water quality, but scarcely studied in Malaysia. This study was undertaken to determine the quality of water at Fraser’s Hill and Pangkor Island using physicochemical and biological methods. Water quality assessment was carried out by measuring water temperature, pH, Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), Dissolved Oxygen (DO), ammoniacal nitrogen (NH3-N) and Total Dissolved Solids (TDS). Water Quality Index (WQI) was obtained by calculating the mean values of above measurements. All water quality measurements were analyzed using one-way analysis of variance (p≤0.05) and the levels of significance of the differences between the localities checked using ANOVA. The water quality indices (WQI) of the water bodies in Fraser’s Hill (94.01) and Pangkor Island (82.21) were rated as Class I and Class II, respectively. This was confirmed by the diversity of the water beetle species (Fraser’s Hill 0.69; Pangkor Island 0.52) found at these locations. The information that beetles are good indicators of pollution means that this could serve as an additional tool for rapid assessment of water quality, in addition to chemical and physical analysis.