Abstract
A comprehensive review was conducted to assess the current state of monitoring approaches for primary faecal indicator bacteria (FIB) E. coli and enterococci. Approaches were identified and examined in relation to their accuracy, ability to provide continuous data and instantaneous detection results, cost, environmental awareness regarding necessary reagent release or other pollution sources, in situ monitoring capability, and portability. Findings showed that several methods are precise and sophisticated but cannot be performed in real-time or remotely. This is mainly due to their laboratory testing requirements, such as lengthy sample preparations, the requirement for expensive reagents, and fluorescent tags. This study determined that portable fluorescence sensing, combined with advanced modelling methods to compensate readings for environmental interferences and false positives, can lay the foundations for a hybrid FIB sensing approach, allowing remote field deployment of a fleet of networked FIB sensors that can collect high-frequency data in near real-time. Such sensors will support proactive responses to sudden harmful faecal contamination events. A method is proposed to enable the development of the visioned FIB monitoring tool.
Highlights
The faecal indicator bacteria (FIB) Escherichia coli (E. coli) and enterococci can cause gastrointestinal, respiratory, and/or skin infections [1,2,3]
The Enterococcus group consists of at least five species that live in the intestines of warm-blooded animals, and some strains can replicate in water containing kelp and plankton [12,13,14]
We suggest implementing spectral deconvolution, parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC), self-organising maps (SOM), or other signal disaggregation techniques to attempt to account for the confounding factor such as diesel or tryptophan-like fluorescence (TLF)
Summary
The faecal indicator bacteria (FIB) Escherichia coli (E. coli) and enterococci can cause gastrointestinal, respiratory, and/or skin infections [1,2,3]. E. coli and enterococci are the most typically monitored FIB and reducing the time to a result of monitoring operations is important for proactive management of waters [4]. Can result in diarrheal infections, neonatal meningitis, septicaemia, and urinary tract infections [6,10], and there have been increasing reports of certain E. coli strains blooming in environments without evidence of faecal contamination [11]. The Enterococcus group consists of at least five species that live in the intestines of warm-blooded animals, and some strains can replicate in water containing kelp and plankton [12,13,14]. Enterococci can tolerate drying environments and heterothermic habitats [13], and for monitoring most Australian
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