Tracking pollutants as continua throughout the Thames drainage basin

英国河水的状况及其化学污染日益引起人们的关注。杀虫剂、药品、非法毒品、与塑料有关的化学品和个人护理产品现在遍布英国的河流。在有毒浓度下，它们对依赖河流的动植物和使用河流的人类的健康产生严重的不利影响。改善我们水道质量的一个关键步骤是确定有毒化学物质集中的地点及其来源。一个巨大的挑战是开发方法（数据和理论）来量化整个流域的化学浓度，这些流域可能有点和广泛的污染源。此外，由于化学物质在下游的混合和扩散，确定污染物的来源变得复杂。为了应对这些挑战，我们将把新的、大量的污染物现场测量数据与新开发的计算模型结合起来，这些模型将使我们能够对化学物质浓度进行连续预测。最先进的环境监测数据和计算技术的结合将使我们首次能够对整个盆地的元素浓度进行连续预测。这种连续的预测将提供必要的知识，以确定所有河流的有毒化学物质浓度（不仅仅是上游的采样点）。它们将用于确定污染物的来源，特别是漫射源（例如农业径流），目前很难用现有的监测技术来确定。在这个项目中，我们将把重点放在泰晤士河及其支流上，在那里，最近学术界和环境局测量了bbb100污染物的浓度。泰晤士河是英国人口最多的流域，是大量天然和人造化学物质进入其排水网络的管道。新的化学物质浓度地图将确定河流沿岸需要紧急补救的地方，而且重要的是，确定污染物的点（例如来自废水处理厂）和广泛的（例如来自农业的农药）来源。在这项概念验证研究中，我们将展示如何将现代环境监测技术与尖端计算技术相结合，生成可转移的工具，以量化整个流域中各种化学物质的浓度。在这项研究中开发的框架将用于未来在英国和其他地区连续监测流域的先进技术的应用。

The state of UK river waters and their chemical contamination is of growing concern. Pesticides, pharmaceuticals, illegal drugs, plastic-related chemicals, and personal care products are now found throughout UK rivers. At toxic concentrations they have serious adverse impacts on the health of animals and plants that rely on rivers and on humans that use them. A crucial step towards improving the quality of our waterways is to identify the locations of toxic concentrations of chemicals and where they came from. A big challenge is developing the means (data and theory) to quantify chemical concentrations throughout entire drainage basins, which can have point and widespread sources of pollutants. Additionally, identifying sources of pollutants is complicated by the mixing and dispersal of chemicals as they move downstream. To address these challenges, we will combine new, large, inventories of spot measurements of contaminants of emerging concern with newly developed computational models that will allow us to generate continuous predictions of chemical concentrations. This combination of state-of-the-art environmental monitoring data and computational techniques will allow us, for the first time, to generate continuous predictions of element concentrations throughout entire basins. Such continuous predictions will provide the knowledge necessary to identify all river reaches (not just those upstream of sample sites) with toxic chemical concentrations. They will be used to identify sources of pollutants, especially diffuse sources (e.g. agricultural runoff), which are currently very difficult to identify with existing monitoring techniques. In this project we will focus on the River Thames and its tributaries where the concentrations of >100 contaminants of emerging concern (CEC) have recently been measured by academics and the Environment Agency. The Thames drains the UK's most populous drainage basin and is a conduit for a large range of natural and man-made chemical that are inserted into its drainage network. The new maps of chemical concentrations will identify localities along rivers where urgent remediation is required, and, importantly, identify point (e.g. from waste water treatment plants) and wide-spread (e.g. pesticides from agriculture) sources of pollutants. In this proof-of-concept study, we will show how modern environmental monitoring techniques can be combined with cutting-edge computational techniques to generate transferable tools to quantify concentrations of diverse chemicals throughout drainage basin. The framework developed in this study will be used in future application of advanced techniques for continuous monitoring of drainage basins in the UK and beyond.