Empowering Community Water Data Stakeholders

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 492-506
Author(s):  
John Millar Carroll ◽  
Jordan Beck ◽  
Elizabeth W Boyer ◽  
Shipi Dhanorkar ◽  
Srishti Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Water Quality ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
Quality Data ◽  
Community Informatics ◽  
Water Quality Data ◽  
Quality Practices ◽  
Data Practices ◽  
Information Infrastructures ◽  
Local Water

Abstract Access to clean water is a critical challenge and opportunity for community-level collaboration. People rely on local water sources, but awareness of water quality and participation in water management is often limited. Lack of community engagement can increase risks of water catastrophes, such as those in Flint, Michigan, and Cape Town, South Africa. We investigated water quality practices in a watershed system serving c.100 000 people in the United States. We identified a range of entities including government and nonprofit citizen groups that gather water quality data. Many of these data are accessible in principle to citizens. However, the data are scattered and diverse; information infrastructures are primitive and not integrated. Water quality data and data practices are hidden in plain sight. Based on fieldwork, we consider sociotechnical courses of action, drawing on best practices in human–computer interaction and community informatics, data and environmental systems management.

Effect of Forest Cover on Water Treatment Costs

2017 ◽  
Vol 03 (04) ◽  
pp. 1750006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis Warziniack ◽  
Chi Ho Sham ◽  
Robert Morgan ◽  
Yasha Feferholtz
Keyword(s):  
Water Quality ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Water Treatment ◽  
Forest Cover ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Treatment Costs ◽  
Quality Data ◽  
Water Quality Data ◽  
The Impact

This paper studies the relationship between forest cover and drinking water chemical treatment costs using land use data and a survey by the American Water Works Association (AWWA). The survey gathers cost and water quality data from 37 treatment plants in forested ecoregions of the United States. We model the effect of forest conversion on the cost of water treatment using a two-step process. First, we examine the effect of changes in land use on water quality through an ecological production function. Second, we examine the effect of changes in water quality on cost of treatment through an economic benefits function. We find a negative relationship between forest cover and turbidity, but no relationship between forest cover and total organic carbon (TOC). Increasing forest cover in a watershed by 1% reduces turbidity by 3%, and increasing development by 1% in a watershed increases turbidity by 3%. The impact of development is more consistent across models than the impact of forest cover. We also find a large impact on turbidity from grazing in the watershed. Our economic benefits function shows a 1% increase in turbidity increases water treatment costs by 0.19%, and 1% increase in TOC increases water treatment costs by 0.46%. TOC has a clearer impact on costs than turbidity, which becomes insignificant when we omit one of our observations with high turbidity.

Updating the U.S. Nationwide Urban runoff quality data base

1999 ◽  
Vol 39 (12) ◽  
pp. 9-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
James T. Smullen ◽  
Amy L. Shallcross ◽  
Kelly A. Cave
Keyword(s):  
Water Quality ◽  
Data Base ◽  
Oxygen Demand ◽  
Urban Runoff ◽  
The United States ◽  
Geographic Region ◽  
Storm Water ◽  
Quality Data ◽  
Water Quality Data ◽  
Urban Stormwater Quality

Urban stormwater quality data collected over the past 20 years for several large government-sponsored sampling programs in the United States were assembled and analyzed to develop new nationwide estimators and statistics for urban storm water quality. We believe that this is the first attempt to assemble and analyze these major storm water quality data sets for this purpose. In this paper, the first public report of our work to-date, we present the results of the data acquisition, data base assembly, quality assurance, computation of new stormwater event mean concentrations and associated statistics, and comparisons with the original U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Nationwide Urban Runoff Program (NURP) results. The differences between the pooled means and those estimated from our analysis of the NURP data range from a 79% lower estimate for Copper to a 36% higher estimate for Biochemical Oxygen Demand. It is concluded that the variations between the NURP results and those developed here from the pooling of the three national data bases are important and that future work may provide a basis for differentiating Event Mean Concentrations among urban land uses, geographic region and seasons.

Preliminary Trial Results for the Redesigned STRIDER Platform With Sampling Capability From Different Depths

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rakesh Joshi ◽  
Nathan Bane ◽  
Justin Derickson ◽  
Mark E. Williams ◽  
Abhijit Nagchaudhuri
Keyword(s):  
Water Quality ◽  
Water Samples ◽  
Depth Profiling ◽  
The United States ◽  
Environmental Research ◽  
Quality Data ◽  
United States Department ◽  
Water Sampling ◽  
Water Quality Data ◽  
Preliminary Trial

STRIDER: Semi-Autonomous Tracking Robot with Instrumentation for Data-Acquisition and Environmental Research, a semi-autonomous aquatic vessel, was envisioned for automated water sampling, data collection, and depth profiling to document water quality variables related to agricultural run-offs. Phase-I of the STRIDER project included the capability for STRIDER to collect water samples and water quality data on the surface of water bodies. This paper discusses the Phase-II efforts of the project, in which the previous design of STRIDER was adapted to extend its capabilities to include monitoring, depth profiling, and visualization of in-situ water quality data at various depths as well as collect water samples at each depth for bacterial analysis. At present, the vessel has been utilized for navigation to specified locations using remote control for collecting water quality data and water samples from the surface, as well as 2 feet and 4 feet below the surface at multiple UMES ponds. In a series of preliminary trial runs with the supervision of UMES faculty members and collaborators from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), STRIDER successfully collected 48 water samples for bacterial analysis at different locations and depths of ponds on the UMES campus. Design alternatives are being explored for more efficient water sampling capabilities.

scholarly journals Multistate Evaluation of an Ultrafiltration-Based Procedure for Simultaneous Recovery of Enteric Microbes in 100-Liter Tap Water Samples

2007 ◽  
Vol 73 (13) ◽  
pp. 4218-4225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent R. Hill ◽  
Amy M. Kahler ◽  
Narayanan Jothikumar ◽  
Trisha B. Johnson ◽  
Donghyun Hahn ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Water Quality ◽  
Water Samples ◽  
Tap Water ◽  
The United States ◽  
Size Exclusion ◽  
Quality Data ◽  
Water Quality Parameter ◽  
Rt Pcr ◽  
Water Quality Data ◽  
Small Pore

ABSTRACT Ultrafiltration (UF) is increasingly being recognized as a potentially effective procedure for concentrating and recovering microbes from large volumes of water and treated wastewater. Because of their very small pore sizes, UF membranes are capable of simultaneously concentrating viruses, bacteria, and parasites based on size exclusion. In this study, a UF-based water sampling procedure was used to simultaneously recover representatives of these three microbial classes seeded into 100-liter samples of tap water collected from eight cities covering six hydrologic areas of the United States. The UF-based procedure included hollow-fiber UF as the primary step for concentrating microbes and then used membrane filtration for bacterial culture assays, immunomagnetic separation for parasite recovery and quantification, and centrifugal UF for secondary concentration of viruses. Water samples were tested for nine water quality parameters to investigate whether water quality data correlated with measured recovery efficiencies and molecular detection levels. Average total method recovery efficiencies were 71, 97, 120, 110, and 91% for φX174 bacteriophage, MS2 bacteriophage, Enterococcus faecalis, Clostridium perfringens spores, and Cryptosporidium parvum oocysts, respectively. Real-time PCR and reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) for seeded microbes and controls indicated that tap water quality could affect the analytical performance of molecular amplification assays, although no specific water quality parameter was found to correlate with reduced PCR or RT-PCR performance.

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