On June 24, 2015, EEM Professors Royce Francis and Jonathan Deason served as technical and plenary session moderators at the Workshop on Nutrient Monitoring to Support Water Quality Trading, conducted by the Partnership on Technology Innovation and the Environment (PTIE) in Washington, D.C. The PTIE is a partnership among government, business, investment, academic and environmental organizations to accelerate the development and deployment of technologies to protect public health and the environment. The organization is exploring ways to leverage its multi-sector membership to increase the future use of low cost nutrient sensor technology. The effort complements the EPA’s National Nutrient Sensor Challenge that is aimed at to reduce the price of nutrient sensor technologies.
The Environmental and Energy Management Institute at The George Washington University is leading the main effort to develop a research program to simulate a monitoring framework that can be used to characterize watershed nutrient loading. This framework includes the formulation of guidelines for sensor system deployment. The proposed framework will encompass the determination of watershed or sub-watershed model boundaries, guidelines for site selection and delineation, specification of sensor locations on the modeled site, determination of the monitoring metrics to assess site performance, specification of the fate and transport model for phosphate and nitrate within the watershed based on the efficiencies of particular best management practices (BMPs), and determination of the sensors’ required sensitivity and specificity for particular BMPs.
The research project, entitled “Sensor Network Design for Low-Cost Nitrate and Phosphate Nutrient Monitoring via Simulation and Statistical Methods,” is important because agricultural and industrial processes such as food processing, cultivation and fertilization of food crops, and confined animal feeding operations, as well as municipal runoff, is causing unhealthy levels of surface water nutrients throughout much of the United States and the world.
In the U.S., some of these nutrients and constituents are regulated under the Clean Water Act and state regulations because they cause eutrophication in surface water bodies. Non-point sources of these nutrients are difficult to regulate because they do not originate at a single “point,” and can be difficult to attribute among the sources in a watershed. As a result, coordinated actions among those inputting nutrients to a given watershed could be helpful in reducing nutrient levels in receiving source waters.
One of the approaches used to reduce nutrient concentrations in receiving waters is nutrient trading. In essence, a “source” could implement BMPs that reduce its nutrient discharges. For non-point sources, nutrient discharge reductions typically are estimated based on the BMPs installed. However, it is difficult to verify nutrient reduction efficiencies of BMP installations. Therefore, there is a need to develop watershed-based monitoring systems and related remote sensors that are affordable, adaptable and easy to install and monitor in order to implement a monitoring protocol to verify BMP performance. This would improve source apportionment while at the same time providing a layer of transparency, accuracy and dependability for the nutrients trading market.