The Effects of Agriculture on Canada's Major Watersheds

Abstract

<p>Water contamination is one of the major environmental issues that negatively impacts water quality of watersheds. It negatively affects drinking water and aquatic wildlife, which can indirectly have negative effects on everyone's health. Many different institutions collected samples of water from four of Canada's major watersheds and counted the number of bacteria in each sample. The data used in this paper was taken from one of these institutions and was analysed to investigate if agricultural waste impacts the water quality of these four watersheds. It was found that the agricultural waste produced from nearby farms significantly impacts the water quality of three of these watersheds. Principal component analysis was also done on these data, and it was found that all of the data can be expressed in terms of one variable without losing very much information of the data. The bootstrap distributions of the principal component analysis parameters were estimated, and it was found that the sampling distributions of these parameters are stable. There was also evidence that the variables in the data are not normally distributed and not all the variables are independent.</p>