Notice of RetractionStatistical Analysis of Spatial and Temporal Distribution of Total Nitrogen in Japanese Rivers

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

Eutrophication of coastal oceans as a result of delivery of excess nutrients by rivers is a critical environmental pollution issue on local, regional, and global scale. Information of water quality indicators in both spatial and temporal variations plays a very important role in assessment and management of surface water quality. In this paper, our main objective is to evaluate the spatiotemporal trends in recent water quality conditions in Japanese rivers. Trend analysis is conducted on the 92 major rivers in Japan using the available water quality data of Total Nitrogen recorded from 1992 to 2005 using the Mann Kendall test, a non-parametric statistical method. Our results show that water quality in Japanese rivers has been improved dramatically over the past decades, although there are still problems in some places. The implication for water quality management and importance of environment protection laws are then discussed for the improvement of river water quality in the future. This study presents the usefulness of statistical trend analysis for evaluation and interpretation of water quality datasets with a view to get better information about the water quality for more effective management of water resources in river basins.