Taking a high frequency pulse of rivers: the new wave of water-quality and pollution checks to support integrated real-time river basin management

河流网络中的污染和水质问题是地球面临的最大环境和健康问题之一，影响到水、食品和生态系统安全。然而，我们目前正在经历一场环境监测的技术革命，将水质和污染传感的范式改变到新的领域，这为在复杂地貌中测量水质极端情况开辟了前所未有的机会。最近的传感器革命不是在实地采集水样并将其运回实验室进行后续分析，而是能够就地监测水质，即在发生水质的地方进行实时和直接的监测。这些技术进步不仅能够有效地监测水质和污染输送的持续长期行为，而且还能够更充分地捕捉动态流动和污染事件的事件特征，包括水质极端事件。该项目将走在这些发展的前沿，直接改善我们检测、监测和预防河网污染的方式。最近的跨学科研究促进了确定河流流域污染源区域激活的有用指标的发展。然而，到目前为止，这种分析仅限于对单一污染物和单一地点的监测。这一博士项目将开创新型水质传感器网络和数值模型的组合和集成开发，以提高对整个流域源区激活演变的机制理解。因此，它将推动现场水质监测技术(如吸光度和荧光探头，左图1)以及流域规模水质监测的现有模式，以确定污染源的事件动态。这项研究的结果将直接支持更多基于证据的流域管理预测和管理的发展。

Pollution and water quality concerns within river networks are one of the biggest environmental and health problems facing the planet, impacting water, food, and ecosystem security. However, we are currently experiencing a technological revolution in environmental monitoring, changing paradigms in water quality and pollution sensing to new frontiers that open up unprecedented opportunities for taking the pulse of water quality extremes in complex landscapes. Instead of taking water samples in the field and transporting them back into the laboratory for subsequent analysis, the recent sensor revolution enables the monitoring of water quality in-situ, that is, in real-time and directly where it occurs. These technological advances enable to not only efficiently monitor the continuous long-term behaviour of water quality and pollution transport but also to more adequately capture the event characteristics of dynamic flow and pollution events, including water quality extremes. This project will work at the forefront of these developments to directly improve the way we detect, monitor, and prevent pollution of river networks. Recent interdisciplinary research has triggered the development of useful metrics for the identification of pollution source zone activation in river basins. However, so far such analyses have been limited to the monitoring of single pollutants and single locations.This PhD project will pioneer the combined and integrated development of novel types of water quality sensor networks and numerical models of in order improve the mechanistic understanding of the evolution of source area activation across the catchment continuum. It will therefore push current paradigms in in-situ water quality monitoring technologies (such as absorbance and fluorescence probes, Figure 1 left) as well as river basin scale water quality monitoring in order to identify event-based dynamics of pollution sources. The findings of this study will directly support the development of more evidence based prediction and management of river basin management.