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Top1. Introduction
Minera Panamá S.A. (MPSA), wholly owned by Minera Panamá S.A-First Quantum Minerals Ltd (MPSA-FQML), is investigating the feasibility of developing the MPSA Project Mina de Cobre Panamá (the Project). The proposed Project would mine and process copper sulfide ore in the Petaquilla Concession, Panamá. This concession covers an area of 130 square kilometers (km2) and is located in the District of Donoso, Colón Province, in north-central Panamá. The concession contains at least three spatially distinct copper ore bodies (Colina, Botija and Valle Grande) and three conventional open pit mines are currently planned to exploit these ore bodies (EIAs, 2010).
The copper sulfide ore will be mined using conventional open pit mining and will be processed using crushing, milling, flotation recovery and concentrate dewatering. The proposed design ore feed to the processing plant is 150,000 tons per day (t/d). It is expected that this will be expanded to 225,000 t/d at year ten by the addition of a third processing line. The Project will export materials through a port site to be constructed on the Caribbean coast at Punta Rincón and linked to the main Project site by a road, a power line corridor, and buried pipelines for transfer of products and other materials. As the nation of Panama develops, increasing industrialization and urbanization has led to a wide-scale contamination of many surface water resources from industrial effluents, domestic sewage discharges, and excessive use of fertilizers, pesticides and the emerging mining activities. Then, it may be inferred that the increased anthropogenic pressures and natural processes are accounting for degradation in surface water and groundwater quality (Carpenter et al., 1998). Hence, given these pressures experienced on the water resources in the area, the main objectives of conservation must be in the control and minimization of pollution occurrences and problems facing these pollutants and to provide water of an adequate quality that can serve different purposes, such as drinking water, irrigation water (Dinar et al., 1995). Then, the monitoring of water quality for any water body must be one of the highest priorities for their protection policy (Lewis, 2000).
Multivariate statistical methods such as factor analysis and principal components have been used successfully in hydrochemistry for many years. Nowadays, with the emerging technique offered by data- mining, the water quality of a given river state can reveal features otherwise not seen by conventional methods. Multivariate techniques allow us to discover the information hidden in the data set about the possible environmental influences on water quality (Spanos et al., 2003). Today, data mining is popular among researchers of water quality investigations, for example in regard to chlorophyll levels, Lu & Huang (2009) proposed Decision-making tree to forecast levels for the next day. Also, Fu-Cheng & Xue-Zhao (2013), suggested the use of fuzzy c-means clustering method to classify and assess rural surface water quality built on monitoring data from 33 water quality stations in 23 rural rivers and 4 reservoirs in Lianyungang city (China). Multivariate methods have several shortcomings such as the presence of mathematical calculations, equal treatment and process to the old and new data, problems with prediction and classification task due to multivariate overlapping of the parameters. Notwithstanding, data mining and machine learning techniques have shown to achieve great success in many disciplines (Mjolsness & DeCoste, 2001). Nevertheless, it is a well-known fact that data mining algorithms work best on large data sets, yet there are several studies which encourages its application on small databases (Jiang et al., 2009; Andonie, 2010; Natek & Zwilling, 2014).
In this study, we evaluated the possibility that a smaller group of water quality parameters could provide sufficient information for assessing water quality. For this reason, Factor analysis and data mining methods were applied to water quality data obtained from the surface waters of three (3) water quality monitoring stations at the Petaquilla River Basin during two hydrological seasons (high and low flows).