Tourism And Ecosystem Services

Lakes are freshwater bodies having several economic importance and ecosystem services. They serve as a home of aquatic organisms, keeping water table level, biodiversity preservation, climate regulation, and flood control. Numerous contaminants enter to them through means of point and nonpoint sources. Pollutant enrichment in the lakes degrades water and sediment qualities which are the most important components of aquatic biota wellbeing and disturbs normal ecological functions. Normally, sediment is said to be polluted by heavy metals when traced concentrations have been detected above the corresponding geochemical pre-pollution of the region.

Aquatic environment pollutants enrichment is sign of intense anthropogenic activities. Heavy metals are among the pollutants producing serious problems due to their distinctive characteristics, such as long persistence in sediment, high toxicity, bioaccumulation, and biomagnifications.

Besides, their incapability to degrade made them with the ultimate fate of deposition in sediment or accumulation by aquatic dwellers. So sediments are archive of several heavy metals that have the potential to demolish aquatic environment ecology over time.

Hence, sediment are very helpful indicator to investigate the occurrence level of insoluble pollutants, heavy metals and to identify their probable sources. Generally, heavy metals can be originated from different sources, broadly from anthropogenic activities and geochemical backgrounds. China’s industrial economic growth enhances heavy metals availability in the country’s soil and this finally polluted the nation’s environmental Media (water, air). Pollutants sourced from several anthropogenic and natural phenomena enter lakes via a number of discharging mechanisms.

Obsolete products made of these metals are biodegraded in to elemental or complex compound form and finally deposited into the sediments layer.

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Therefore, at present, Chinese sediment lakes exceeded grade II level in accordance with Chinese soil quality standards. Continuous enrichment of heavy metals, increase their chance of being accumulated by aquatic life and becoming subject of severe health effect on Chinese people and their environment through food chain. Hebei province where Baiyangdian lake locate is as one of the provinces approximately at high ecological risk consequential from heavy metals which Cd particularly was figure out a majorly at higher level. Baiyangdian Lake is a kidney of the north china people due to its local resident’s livelihood economic contribution, drinking and irrigation water supply, aquaculture, tourism, and ecosystem services including stabilization of underground water, flooding control and biodiversity conservation in the region.

Most of themetals originated from anthropogenic, including agricultural chemicals, aquaculture, boat transportation, domestic direct discharge, Inflow River and industries discharge, manufactured goods disposals. Hence, in addition of the natural weathering enrichment, these several anthropogenic contributing metals pollution through direct discharge and inflowing streams mechanisms make lake water quality deteriorated recently. Pollution increment is approximately equivalent to socio economic development and urbanization of the region. On the basis of several literatures, It has confirmed that heavy existed at aquatic environment can be accumulated and potentially posed a risks to fish species, submerged aquatic plants internal tissues development and top trophic levels feed on these components. Baiyangdian lake wetland encompasses of several macrophytes and fish species.

The fish are grown naturally and multiply by aquaculture. Therefore, lake heavy metals pollution level can accumulate in the biota substantially and cause remarkable effect in their physiological development. Biodiversity of these species of submerged plants abundance reduces recently. Broadly, metals categorized as essential for physiological mechanism of organisms while some of them have no any role. But, even essential metals can be toxic if their content exceed organisms required amount . So that, ascertain their extent concentrations extent is fundamentally important. Small organisms living at benthic zone of aquatic ecosystem serve as food predators and heavy metals will biomagnified proportionally and risk transferred equivalently.