Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

The chemical composition and surrounding land use of bodies of water in a catchment are vital
factors concerning how water within lakes can be used. Sweden has for a long time monitored
these factors via the national water monitoring system, resulting in a large time series of data
collected with the same method in a consistent way. These data are important, since it is used to
draw overarching conclusions about the state of Swedish water. One of the use cases of this data
would be drawing conclusions concerning the Swedish drinking water, as having a large
overarching set of data would provide insights into the condition of our drinking water lakes. The
purpose of this thesis is to find out if the conclusions drawn from the National water monitoring
system are relevant to the drinking water industry based on the comparison of their catchment
characteristics, thereby allowing the researchers and environmental analysts to use this data to
draw conclusions concerning the Swedish drinking water. This was done by me creating a GIS
shapefile of the catchments of lakes that are possible raw water sources. As a proxy for raw water
sources we used lakes covered by water protection areas, as the location and ID’s of the actual raw
water sources aren’t publicly available information. The attributes of these are then extracted and
compared to the attributes of the National water monitoring system via non-parametric tests and
comparison of the distributions. The aggregated forest characteristic was shown to be comparable
to both NWMS categories, the peat depth, open wetland, longitude and water characteristic to the
Omdrevslake category, and the latitude characteristic comparable to the Trendlake category.