State of Our Estuaries 2009

The 2009 State of the Estuaries Report describes the status and trends of 12 primary indicators tracked by PREP. For each key indicator, the report provides the monitoring question and answer, PREP management goal, information on relevance, and an explanation of data analysis and interpretation. Additional information from other related indicators is presented to provide context or further explain trends. In total data from 28 different indicators are included in this report. About half of the indicators presented include data for Maine. Future reports will fully integrate the Maine portion of the PREP focus area

Wireless aquatic navigator for detection and analysis (WANDA)

The cost of monitoring and detecting pollutants in natural waters is of major concern. Current and forthcoming bodies of legislation will continue to drive demand for spatial and selective monitoring of our environment, as the focus increasingly moves towards effective enforcement of legislation through detection of events, and unambiguous identification of perpetrators. However, these monitoring demands are not being met due to the infrastructure and maintenance costs of conventional sensing models. Advanced autonomous platforms capable of performing complex analytical measurements at remote locations still require individual power, wireless communication, processor and electronic transducer units, along with regular maintenance visits. Hence the cost base for these systems is prohibitively high, and the spatial density and frequency of measurements are insufficient to meet requirements. In this paper we present a more cost effective approach for water quality monitoring using a low cost mobile sensing/communications platform together with very low cost stand-alone ‘satellite’ indicator stations that have an integrated colorimetric sensing material. The mobile platform is equipped with a wireless video camera that is used to interrogate each station to harvest information about the water quality. In simulation experiments, the first cycle of measurements is carried out to identify a ‘normal’ condition followed by a second cycle during which the platform successfully detected and communicated the presence of a chemical contaminant that had been localised at one of the satellite stations

A Review on the Application of Natural Computing in Environmental Informatics

Natural computing offers new opportunities to understand, model and analyze the complexity of the physical and human-created environment. This paper examines the application of natural computing in environmental informatics, by investigating related work in this research field. Various nature-inspired techniques are presented, which have been employed to solve different relevant problems. Advantages and disadvantages of these techniques are discussed, together with analysis of how natural computing is generally used in environmental research.Comment: Proc. of EnviroInfo 201

Quarterly literature review of the remote sensing of natural resources

The Technology Application Center reviewed abstracted literature sources, and selected document data and data gathering techniques which were performed or obtained remotely from space, aircraft or groundbased stations. All of the documentation was related to remote sensing sensors or the remote sensing of the natural resources. Sensors were primarily those operating within the 10 to the minus 8 power to 1 meter wavelength band. Included are NASA Tech Briefs, ARAC Industrial Applications Reports, U.S. Navy Technical Reports, U.S. Patent reports, and other technical articles and reports

Third Earth Resources Technology Satellite Symposium. Volume 3: Discipline summary reports

Presentations at the conference covered the following disciplines: (1) agriculture, forestry, and range resources; (2) land use and mapping; (3) mineral resources, geological structure, and landform surveys; (4) water resources; (5) marine resources; (6) environment surveys; and (7) interpretation techniques

Underwater Fish Detection using Deep Learning for Water Power Applications

Clean energy from oceans and rivers is becoming a reality with the development of new technologies like tidal and instream turbines that generate electricity from naturally flowing water. These new technologies are being monitored for effects on fish and other wildlife using underwater video. Methods for automated analysis of underwater video are needed to lower the costs of analysis and improve accuracy. A deep learning model, YOLO, was trained to recognize fish in underwater video using three very different datasets recorded at real-world water power sites. Training and testing with examples from all three datasets resulted in a mean average precision (mAP) score of 0.5392. To test how well a model could generalize to new datasets, the model was trained using examples from only two of the datasets and then tested on examples from all three datasets. The resulting model could not recognize fish in the dataset that was not part of the training set. The mAP scores on the other two datasets that were included in the training set were higher than the scores achieved by the model trained on all three datasets. These results indicate that different methods are needed in order to produce a trained model that can generalize to new data sets such as those encountered in real world applications.Comment: Accepted at CSCI 201

A molecular imprinted polymer based sensor for measuring phosphate in wastewater samples

Phosphate detection in water samples is still completed using colorimetric standard methods, which have a number of disadvantages, to such as being time consuming, requiring filtration, a number of different reagents, frequent calibration and proper disposal of waste chemicals generated. Hence, a simple cost effective analytical method and instrumentation is highly desirable to aid the optimisation of treatment processes and assist the water industry in their efforts to comply with stringent regulations such as the EU's Water Framework Directive. A sensor based on molecular imprinted polymer (MIP) and a conductance transducer was developed for direct and label-free detection of phosphate in water. The sensor was able to measure the presence of phosphate in wastewater samples with good reproducibility, a linear range of 0.66-8 mg P L-1 and a lower detection limit of 0.16 mg P L-1. The sensor was further tested to measure phosphate concentrations in unfiltered field samples such as domestic wastewater treatment influent and river water and demonstrated a close correlation with reference measurements. The phosphate MIP sensor offers a way forward as either a handheld sensor for use in the field, or as a potential solution for remote, continuous monitoring of phosphate

Heavy metal/toxins detection using electronic tongues

FAPESP - FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULOCNPQ - CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICOThe growing concern for sustainability and environmental preservation has increased the demand for reliable, fast response, and low-cost devices to monitor the existence of heavy metals and toxins in water resources. An electronic tongue (e-tongue) is a multisensory array mostly based on electroanalytical methods and multivariate statistical techniques to facilitate information visualization in a qualitative and/or quantitative way. E-tongues are promising analytical devices having simple operation, fast response, low cost, easy integration with other systems (microfluidic, optical, etc) to enable miniaturization and provide a high sensitivity for measurements in complex liquid media, providing an interesting alternative to address many of the existing environmental monitoring challenges, specifically relevant emerging pollutants such as heavy metals and toxins.73119FAPESP - FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULOCNPQ - CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICOFAPESP - FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULOCNPQ - CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICOSem informaçã