Abstract
With increasing human populations in coastal regions, there is growing concern over the quality of wastewater treatment plant (WTP) discharge and its impacts on coastal biodiversity, recreational amenities, and human health. In Australia, the current system of WTP monitoring and reporting varies across states and jurisdictions leading to a lack of data transparency and accountability, leading to a reduced ability to comprehensively assess regional and national scale biodiversity impacts and health risks. The National Outfall Database (NOD) was developed to provide a centralized spatial data management system for sharing and communicating comprehensive, national-scale WTP pollutant data. This research describes the structure of the NOD and through self-organizing maps and principal component analysis, provides a comprehensive, national-scale analysis of WTP effluent. Such a broad understanding of the constituents and level of pollutants in coastal WTP effluent within a public database provides for improved transparency and accountability and an opportunity to evaluate health risks and develop national water quality standards.
Highlights
With increasing human populations in coastal regions and an increase in extreme weather events due to climate change (Meehl et al, 2000), there is growing concern over the quality of wastewater treatment plant (WTP) discharge and the impacts of effluent on coastal biodiversity and human health (Schwarzenbach et al, 2010; Jagai et al, 2015)
The governance and performance of WTPs in Australia sits in stark contrast to the frameworks that have been established in other parts of the world
The NOD provides a comprehensive database for making outfall monitoring data accessible and transparent by allowing for the investigation of the general patterns of the effluent quality across Australian coastal outfalls
Summary
With increasing human populations in coastal regions and an increase in extreme weather events due to climate change (Meehl et al, 2000), there is growing concern over the quality of wastewater treatment plant (WTP) discharge and the impacts of effluent on coastal biodiversity and human health (Schwarzenbach et al, 2010; Jagai et al, 2015). Land-based pollutants, from sewage and storm water runoff, enter the coastal marine environment through discharge points, typically from WTPs (Carey and Migliaccio, 2009; Mallin et al, 2009). This effluent significantly increases organic and inorganic nutrients and turbidity levels in receiving waters, which can cascade across several levels of ecological organization to change the key properties of benthos and fish communities (Roberts, 1996; Burd et al, 2012; Campbell et al, 2015; Yu et al, 2016; White et al, 2018). Often the economic sector, such as aquaculture industries, are affected due to high levels of bacterial contamination, which decrease production during the harvest season (Campos et al, 2015).
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