Development of a Risk Index for Use in Water Quality Monitoring

• Published in: Water conservation science and engineering 2017-03, Vol.1 (4), p.209-221
• Main Authors: Jones, Lisa, Styles, David, Kinsella, Brian, Lawlor, Antoin, Furey, Ambrose, Regan, Fiona
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Datasets; Earth and Environmental Science; Effluents; Emission; Emission standards; Emissions; Environment; Environmental protection; Heavy metals; Hydrologic data; Hydrology/Water Resources; Industrial effluents; Monitoring; Original Paper; Pollutants; Rainfall; Ratings & rankings; Risk; Sustainable Development; Traffic information; Wastewater treatment; Wastewater treatment plants; Water Industry/Water Technologies; Water management; Water monitoring; Water quality; Water quality management
• ISSN: 2366-3340; 2364-5687
• DOI: 10.1007/s41101-016-0014-y

Risk indices have recently emerged as an effective and efficient tool in the area of water quality monitoring with new indices taking in vast quantities of data and facilitating the development of more targeted water monitoring programs. With the Water Framework Directive demanding that monitoring requirements for a list of priority substances be met, achieving ‘good’ status in all water bodies by 2015, there is a strong need for improved monitoring programmes. In order to improve future monitoring programmes by making the process more ‘targeted’ a simple risk-based index for the occurrence of priority substances in wastewater treatment plant effluent was devised. This index was developed through the collection of an extensive list of documents relating to priority substance emission factors. These included wastewater treatment licence applications, trade effluent licences, traffic data, rainfall data, and census data. It was found that by relating data from each of these sources to historic occurrence data, it was possible to conceptualise and develop a ranking of risk of occurrence of priority substances. Validation of this index was carried out using data from a 24-month sampling plan at nine sites in two counties in Ireland representative of different pressures, i.e. agricultural, industrial and domestic. This work has allowed for the compilation of a large dataset of emission factor and priority substance occurrence in Ireland where none previously existed. For the first time, a risk-based index has been developed for Irish wastewater treatment plant effluents. Together, the index and dataset can be used by policy makers and inform the development of future priority substance monitoring programmes.