Wasserstein distributional distance and linear programming convergence planning as monitoring network benchmarking tools: cross-continental surface water quality assessment across Brazilian and European river basins.

ABSTRACT: Evaluating the performance of long-term water quality monitoring networks against international reference systems requires analytical tools capable of comparing entire empirical distributions - not merely summary statistics - yet distributional benchmarking methods have rarely been applied at the cross-continental scale. This study develops and applies a four-method analytical framework - combining Wasserstein-1 distributional distance (earth mover's distance), Shannon-entropy-weighted TOPSIS, linear programming (LP) convergence planning, and principal component analysis with hierarchical cluster analysis (PCA/HCA) - to compare ten São Paulo river basins (Brazil) against 23 European countries monitored under the Water Framework Directive (WFD), using a harmonised dataset of 646,356 CETESB

SUBMITTER: Pimentel Tavares H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC13582108 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature