Comment on 'Assessing water quality of five typical reservoirs in lower reaches of Yellow River, China: Using a water quality index method' by Wei Hou, Shaohua Sun, Mingquan Wang, Xiang Li, Nuo Zhang, Xiaodong Xin, Li Sun, Wei Li, and Ruibao Jia (2016) [Ecological Indicators, 61, 309-316]

摘要

Hou et al. (2016) recently developed a water quality index (WQI) for assessing water quality of five typical reservoirs. Despite all the merits of the practical WQI, it suffers from lack of uncertainty consideration; a fact that motivated the present discussion focusing on mitigation of uncertainty in water quality assessment. In this regard, superiority of employing fuzzy WQI (FWQI) rather than crisp WQI is emphasized. Due to robustness of FWQI in handling uncertainties surrounding data acquisition, employment of fuzzy concept can improve water quality assessment and monitoring to generate results which are more consistent with real world conditions. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.