Utilising eDNA Methods and Interactive Data Dashboards for Managing Sustainable Drinking Water

Abstract

Generating rapid, easy-to-interpret community data for drinking reservoirs as a means of tackling water quality management is of increasing demand within the water industry. Taste and odour (T&O) is one of many increasing concerns to water companies worldwide, incurring huge costs as customer complaints accumulate and additional treatment and resource management are required. However, there remains a two-fold issue in addressing T&O management: firstly, predicting the initial onset of a T&O event relies on a highly complex understanding of environmental considerations and their interaction with T&O-related taxa, and secondly, there remains a lag between the notification of a T&O event and the resolution of the issue by reservoir management staff. This is partly due to slow, low-resolution methods of detecting and reliably identifying problem taxa in samples. These methods are unable to provide information on the huge plethora of taxa related to T&O metabolite production and often cannot provide data in a timely enough manner for an opportune management response. This means the water industry is often forced to use a reactive, rather than proactive, approach to water quality monitoring. Here, we present methods for implementing a high-throughput sequencing approach to monitoring drinking reservoirs for water quality and improving the sustainability of water supplies, as well as methods for presenting these data on easy-to-interpret data dashboards that can be updated rapidly as new data are generated. Our methods and dashboarding approaches are currently being trialled and tested within the UK water industry, and so here, we show anonymised examples of those data presentations. We propose that these methods can greatly aid reservoir management teams in their approach to T&O monitoring and can be used to implore more sustainable management pipelines, safeguarding future water sources.