Current Environmental Monitoring Research Articles

Monitoring the Health of Coastal Environments in the Pacific Region-A Review.

Coastal areas provide important ecological services to populations accessing, for example, tourism services, fisheries, minerals and petroleum. Coastal zones worldwide are exposed to multiple stressors that threaten the sustainability of receiving environments. Assessing the health of these valuable ecosystems remains a top priority for environmental managers to ensure the key stressor sources are identified and their impacts minimized. The objective of this review was to provide an overview of current coastal environmental monitoring frameworks in the Asia-Pacific region. This large geographical area includes many countries with a range of climate types, population densities and land uses. Traditionally, environmental monitoring frameworks have been based on chemical criteria set against guideline threshold levels. However, regulatory organizations are increasingly promoting the incorporation of biological effects-based data in their decision-making processes. Using a range of examples drawn from across the region, we provide a synthesis of the major approaches currently being applied to examine coastal health in China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. In addition, we discuss some of the challenges and investigate potential solutions for improving traditional lines of evidence, including the coordination of regional monitoring programs, the implementation of ecosystem-based management and the inclusion of indigenous knowledge and participatory processes in decision-making.

Non-target analysis of organohalogenated contaminants in deep-sea fishes from the Mediterranean Sea by comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography–time-of-flight mass spectrometry

The enhanced separation power and identification capabilities make comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography–time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC × GC − ToF MS) a valuable instrumental alternative for non-target analysis (NTA). In the present study, GC × GC − ToF MS has been used for the NTA of chlorine- and bromine-containing compounds in composite livers of two scarcely investigated Mediterranean deep-sea fish species, hollowsnout grenadier (Coelorinchus caelorhincus) and roughsnout grenadier (Trachyrhinchus trachyrhinchus). Attention focused on the identification of organohalogenated compounds with structural characteristics similar to those of persistent organic pollutants (POPs). In total, 116 Cl-, Br- and mixed Cl/Br-compounds were either positively or tentatively identified in the analyzed liver samples. Up to 88 of these compounds were legacy POPs, being polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and organochlorinated pesticides (OCPs) the most abundant and frequently detected families. The other 28 identified POP-like compounds were analytes not considered by current regulation and environmental monitoring programs, including, among others, degradation products of specific OCPs, naturally produced organohalogen compounds and several perchlorinated diethyldiphenylmethane-derivatives whose presence in the investigated species is reported here for the first time. The presence of other naturally occurring brominated and mixed halogenated compounds in these fish species is also described for the first time. Our results also showed differences in the accumulation profile of the identified compounds in both species. Thereby, anthropogenic POPs showed higher relative abundances in the livers of roughsnout grenadiers than those in hollowsnout grenadiers, while for naturally occurring compounds the opposite trend or similar levels were found in both species.

Identification of Environmental Pollutants in Construction Site Monitoring Using Association Rule Mining and Ontology-Based Reasoning

Pollutants from construction activities of building projects can have serious negative impacts on the natural environment and human health. Carrying out monitoring of environmental pollutants during the construction period can effectively mitigate environmental problems caused by construction activities and achieve sustainable development of the construction industry. However, the current environmental monitoring method relying only on various sensors is relatively singlar which is unable to cope with a complex on-site environment We propose a mechanism for environmental pollutants identification combining association rule mining and ontology-based reasoning and using random forest algorithm to improve the accuracy of identification. Firstly, the ontology model of environmental pollutants monitoring indicator in the construction site is built in order to integrate and share the relative knowledge. Secondly, the improved Apriori algorithm with added subjective and objective constraints is used for association rule mining among environmental pollutants monitoring indicators, and the random forest algorithm is applied to further filter the strong association rules. Finally, the ontology database and rule database are loaded into a Jena reasoning machine for inference to establish an identification mechanism of environmental pollutants. The results of running on a real estate development project in Jiangning District, Nanjing, prove that this identification mechanism can effectively tap the potential knowledge in the field of environmental pollutants monitoring, explore the relationship between environmental pollutants monitoring indicators and then overcome the shortcomings of traditional monitoring methods that only rely on sensors to provide new ideas and methods for making intelligent decisions on environmental pollutants in a construction site.

A Review of Current Regional-Level Environmental Monitoring

Environmental monitoring helps us take stock of our natural environment. Clear, coordinated and consistent regional-level monitoring and reporting are required to assess the state of our environment and protect important sociocultural and economic assets. This article reviews and summarises the key issues affecting regional-level environmental monitoring, reporting and enforcement in Aotearoa New Zealand. These include weak legislation, lack of independent monitoring, patchy data coverage, misuse and distortion ofdata, insecure funding and inappropriate political interference. Solutions include legislative reform, consolidation of funding and centralisation of some roles, and establishing a centralised research council.

Omics-based ecosurveillance for the assessment of ecosystem function, health, and resilience.

Current environmental monitoring efforts often focus on known, regulated contaminants ignoring the potential effects of unmeasured compounds and/or environmental factors. These specific, targeted approaches lack broader environmental information and understanding, hindering effective environmental management and policy. Switching to comprehensive, untargeted monitoring of contaminants, organism health, and environmental factors, such as nutrients, temperature, and pH, would provide more effective monitoring with a likely concomitant increase in environmental health. However, even this method would not capture subtle biochemical changes in organisms induced by chronic toxicant exposure. Ecosurveillance is the systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of ecosystem health-related data that can address this knowledge gap and provide much-needed additional lines of evidence to environmental monitoring programs. Its use would therefore be of great benefit to environmental management and assessment. Unfortunately, the science of ‘ecosurveillance’, especially omics-based ecosurveillance is not well known. Here, we give an overview of this emerging area and show how it has been beneficially applied in a range of systems. We anticipate this review to be a starting point for further efforts to improve environmental monitoring via the integration of comprehensive chemical assessments and molecular biology-based approaches. Bringing multiple levels of omics technology-based assessment together into a systems-wide ecosurveillance approach will bring a greater understanding of the environment, particularly the microbial communities upon which we ultimately rely to remediate perturbed ecosystems.

Direct injection analysis of oxypurinol and metformin in wastewater by hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry.

The increasing global prevalence of gout and diabetes has led to a rise in the use of their respective medications, allopurinol and metformin. These are excreted via urine as oxypurinol and metformin and are discharged into wastewater and the environment. Current environmental monitoring of those two polar chemicals requires labour intensive and potentially inefficient sample pre‐treatments, such as using solid‐phase extraction or freeze‐drying. This study validated a sensitive and simple method using direct‐injection LC–MS/MS for the simultaneous measurement of oxypurinol and metformin in wastewater. The final method utilised a hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography together with simple filtration through 0.2 μm regenerated cellulose filter followed by dilution in acetonitrile with a dilution factor of 10. The developed method was validated with the limit of quantifications (LOQ) of 0.11 and 0.34 μg/L for metformin and oxypurinol, respectively. The new method was applied to 42 influent wastewater samples and 6 effluent samples collected from 6 Australian wastewater treatment plants. Both compounds were detected well above the LOQ at concentrations 29–214 μg/L in influent and 2–53 μg/L in effluent for metformin, and 24–248 μg/L in influent and 4–81 μg/L in effluent for oxypurinol, demonstrating its high applicability.

Spatial Analysis of Citizens' Environmental Complaints in China: Implications in Environmental Monitoring and Governance.

Citizen environmental complaints play a key role in China’s current environmental monitoring network and environmental governance system. Based on 5796 cases of environmental complaints lodged by citizens via hotline and the internet to the MEP of China, we examined the spatial characteristics and influencing factors of citizen complaints for the period of 2013–2017 using spatial analysis methods and spatial econometric models. The roles of citizen complaints in the two systems were then reevaluated. The results show that, among all cases, 75.88% of cases were identified as verified complaints, while nearly a 25% noisy rate directed large amounts of inspection resources to be utilized in response to nonverified cases. Air pollution received the most attention by citizens in China, accounting for 67.22% of total cases. The hotspots of citizen complaints were mostly distributed in the three major national urban agglomerations in China. We found that industrial wastewater and SO2 were positively associated with the likelihood of citizens filing complaints, while the effect of industrial soot/dust emission was insignificant. Citizen complaints might be triggered by certain, but not all, forms of pollutants, even though highly visible particulate pollutants did not necessarily induce corresponding complaints. Moreover, the negative relationship between citizen complaints and per capita GDP revealed the unbalanced geographical pattern between economical development and environmental quality. The proliferation of the internet greatly facilitated citizens lodging complaints through various ways. The synergy mechanism between citizen environmental complaints and other parts in China’s environmental monitoring and governance system should be established in the future.

Establishment of a Target, Suspect, and Functional Group-Dependent Screening Strategy for Organophosphate Esters (OPEs): "Into the Unknown" of OPEs in the Sediment of Taihu Lake, China.

Current environmental monitoring studies are generally confined to several target organophosphate esters (OPEs), and there is a lack of strategies for comprehensively screening all potential OPEs in environmental samples. Here, an effective and accurate strategy was developed for the target, suspect, and functional group-dependent screening of OPEs by the use of ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography-Q Exactive hybrid quadrupole-Orbitrap high-resolution mass spectrometry (UHPLC-Q-Orbitrap HRMS), and this strategy was applied for the analysis of n = 74 sediment samples (including 23 surface sediment samples and 51 sediment core samples) collected from Taihu Lake (eastern China) in 2019. In these analyzed samples, we successfully identified n = 35 OPEs, and 23 of them were reported in this region for the first time. In addition, this strategy also presented other interesting findings, i.e., (1) OPE concentrations decreased with increasing distance from the coast of the lake; (2) the newly identified 3-hydroxyphenyl diphenyl phosphate (meta-OH-TPHP) was not statistically significantly correlated with triphenyl phosphate (TPHP; r = 0.02494, p = 0.9101) but with resorcinol bis(diphenyl phosphate) (RDP) (r = 0.9271, p < 0.0001) and three other OPEs; and (3) the summed concentrations of aryl OPEs (∑arylOPEs) in sediment core samples exhibited significantly increasing trends as the depth decreased. Collectively, this study provided an effective strategy that was successfully applied for comprehensive screening of OPEs in the sediments of Taihu Lake, and this strategy could have promising potential to be extended to other environmental matrices or samples.

The chloride ion to the chemical oxygen demand (COD) analysis of the influence of different analysis method

Research shows that chloride ion in the process of chemical oxygen demand (COD) analysis has a huge impact on the results of the analysis, How to improve the accuracy of chemical oxygen demand analysis results in the presence of chlorine ion interference is a difficult problem in current environmental monitoring work, This article introduces the chlorine ion in different analysis method to analysis the influence degree of the chemical oxygen demand (COD).

Improving Data Quality of Low-cost IoT Sensors in Environmental Monitoring Networks Using Data Fusion and Machine Learning Approach

Abstract Environmental monitoring has become an active research area due to the current rise in the global climate change crises. Current environmental monitoring solutions, however, are characterized by high cost of acquisition and complexity of installation; often requiring extensive resources, infrastructure and expertise. It is infeasible to achieve with these solutions, high density in-situ networks such as are required to build refined scale models to facilitate robust monitoring, thus, leaving large gaps within the collected dataset. Low-Cost Sensors (LCS) can offer high-resolution spatiotemporal measurements which could be used to supplement existing dataset from current environmental monitoring solutions. LCS however, require frequent calibration in order to provide accurate and reliable data as they are often affected by environmental conditions when deployed on the field. Calibrating LCS can help to improve their data quality and ensure they are collecting accurate data. Achieving effective calibration, however, requires identifying factors that affect sensor’s data quality for a given measurement. This study evaluates the performance of three Feature Selection (FS) algorithms including Forward Feature Selection (FFS), Backward Elimination (BE) and Exhaustive Feature Selection (EFS) in identifying factors that affect data quality of low-cost IoT sensors in environmental monitoring networks. Applying the concept of data fusion, sensors data were merged with environmental factors and integrated into a single calibration equation to calibrate cairclipO3/NO2 and cairclipNO2 sensors using Linear Regression (LR) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The study showed the effectiveness of calibration in improving low-cost IoT sensor data quality and also demonstrated the convenience of feature selection and the ability of data fusion to provide more consistent, accurate and reliable information for calibration models. The analysis showed that the cairclipO3/NO2 sensor provided measurements that have good correlation with reference measurements whereas the cairclipNO2 sensor showed no reasonable correlation with the reference data. Calibrating the cairclipO3/NO2 yielded good improvement in its measurement outputs when compared to reference measurements (R2=0.83). However, calibrating the cairclipNO2 sensor data yielded no significant improvement in its data quality.

Analysis of measures to improve the quality of atmospheric environmental monitoring

With the continuous deterioration of environmental quality, environmental issues have become one of the important factors restricting China’s economic and social development. The levy of the environmental protection tax in 2018 is a major measure of the state in the governance of environmental issues. The theoretical analysis of taxes on environmental governance is particularly important. Environmental monitoring quality has a crucial impact on environmental management. Environmental monitoring is an important part of the environmental protection system. In the current environmental monitoring work, there are many factors that affect the quality of environmental monitoring, and these factors must be comprehensively and carefully analyzed. Pay sufficient attention to various factors affecting environmental monitoring, strengthen the management of environmental monitoring quality, and further improve the quality of environmental monitoring. This paper mainly analyzes and explores the influencing factors of the quality of environmental monitoring, and puts forward corresponding countermeasures based on this.

Usability evaluation of an open-source environmental monitoring data dashboard for archivists

Cultural heritage archives engage in monitoring of environmental condition data, typically by employing “datalogger” devices and rudimentary data dashboard interfaces, to ensure collection preservation and avoid damaging environmental conditions, such as high temperature or humidity. Data dashboard interfaces are a popular means of efficiently monitoring complex, high-volume, and real-time data. While open-source software, in which the code may be modified as needed by individuals and/or communities, is widely used in the archives domain for collection management, the commercial environmental monitoring systems tend to be closed source and inflexible in use. The authors’ prior user-centered research with archivist practitioners has indicated many issues with the current commercial environmental monitoring systems and noted the potential for more flexible, open, and modern technology solutions. This research study explores the design and evaluation, through usability testing and heuristic evaluation, of an open-source data dashboard interface for archivists, with an emphasis on understanding the ability of current open-source tools in this realm to support archivists’ interface needs. Though the data dashboard interface was generally efficient and easy to use for archivists, there were several problems identified that require further development and evaluation, some of which may be more technically challenging than reasonable to expect from archivists. Several suggestions for the future directions this work may take are presented, which includes integration into existing popular open-sources systems currently developed by archivists.

Current Status, Challenges, and Policy Recommendations of China's Marine Monitoring Systems for Coastal Persistent Organic Pollution Based on Experts' Questionnaire Analysis.

Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) monitoring and management in typical semi-enclosed bays is a major global environmental issue. This study concentrated on a questionnaire survey and analysis of marine environmental management and monitoring departments at all levels in China, and proposed suggestions on the construction and improvement of POPs monitoring and management system. Results show that POPs are initially involved in China’s current marine environmental monitoring system, and the monitoring strength and capability still need to be continuously improved, mainly in the recognition, funding input, relevant standards, monitoring, and evaluation technical regulations of marine environmental POPs monitoring. Therefore, in order to gradually improve the monitoring and management system of China’s offshore marine environment POPs, this study suggests starting from four directions: (1) Building POPs monitoring system of a marine ecological environment, and strengthening POPs monitoring in different environmental media; (2) strengthening land-based POPs emission and the related human activities’ intensity survey, and establishing a POPs information sharing database; (3) optimizing POPs monitoring technology in the marine environment, and improving POPs supervision and management technical support system; and (4) participating in regional and international marine environment POPs monitoring and evaluation projects, and strengthening the construction of talent teams.

Environmental issues in Chilean salmon farming: a review

AbstractThe growth of Chilean salmon production has not been free of important sanitary and environmental shortcomings. To ensure sustainability, it is necessary to understand the environmental impacts of salmon production on the Patagonian ecosystems. Currently, there is limited regulation or monitoring of impacts in the freshwater phase compared to the marine fattening stage, and there is some evidence of local eutrophication impact and diversity changes downstream the farms. Eutrophication of Patagonian channels and fjords from marine farms has been recognized as crucial environmental risk, although most scientific evidence comes from local effects below and around farms. So far, there are no regulations based on carrying capacity estimates to limit maximum fish biomass per area or water body. There is controversy regarding the potential role of nutrients derived from farming in triggering harmful algal blooms, yet current environmental monitoring and available information does not allow establishing or rejecting a cause–effect relationship. Pesticides used to control sea lice infestation have been shown to be deleterious to some non‐target species. There is evidence that the use of high quantities of antibiotics has allowed the development of antibiotic‐resistant bacteria in sediments and there is concern that salmon aquaculture has the potential to increase the proportion of antimicrobial‐resistant bacteria to antibiotics that are used in human medicine. There is an urgent need for more comprehensive ecosystem (beyond farm) studies on the impacts of antibiotics. Escapes of salmon (exotic species) from farms are a relevant environmental risk, although the most farmed species, Salmo salar, has shown little success in establishing wild populations. The review identifies critical knowledge gaps whose fulfilment is essential to advance towards an ecosystem approach to aquaculture and to protect Patagonian ecosystems.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in surface sediments from the Curonian Lagoon and the Nemunas River Delta (Lithuania, Baltic Sea): distribution, origin, and suggestions for the monitoring program.

Curonian Lagoon is the largest lagoon in the Baltic Sea region suffering from a great anthropogenic pressure. Pollution sources within the Nemunas River basin and those within the Klaipėda Port are the main threats to this sensitive water area. For the first time, such a detailed study on 16 priority polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon distribution, origin, and ecological risks was carried out in the Curonian Lagoon and the Nemunas River Delta. Total PAH concentration ranged from 5.6 to 528.4ngg-1d.w., demonstrating low to moderate pollution. The main identified PAH sources were vehicular and biomass emission, petroleum product spills, and coal combustion. A particularly high naphthalene concentration posing adverse biological effects was detected in the Nemunas River Delta region. Occasional adverse biological effects related to acenaphthene and dibenzo(a)anthracene might be observed in several Curonian Lagoon locations. The data obtained could serve for the improvement of the current regional environmental monitoring program: it reveals the need to take into account different sedimentary environments while choosing sampling locations. In addition to that, more PAHs could be included to the hazardous substance list.

Port Policy and Countermeasures of Shipping Companies Amidst the Change in Greenhouse Gas Regulation on Marine Transport

Maritime transport such as ships have an indispensable role in trading. Due to the growth in population and new demands of economies, there is all the more a need for shipping. Therefore, shipping volume growth increase the likelihood of emission problems and harmful effects to the environment. The aim of this study is to investigate the current systems, status, plans and trends over time in the environmental performance of shipping companies and port authorities. The research is based on the green system from the IMO and EU on issues related to their environmental plan, greenhouse gas emissions and current environmental monitoring and applicable regulations. This study updates previous environmental reviews and several environmental systems, so that the trends over time are drawn. So we investigate the several green&emission systems for emission gases and example of the using by shipping companies and port authorities. Moreover, we review a countermeasure for emission gas systems to ensure efficient, accurate and safe operations of such systems. This research contributes to the extant literature by comparatively investigating each type of green system for emissions of CO2, NOx, SOx and providing each system’s advantages and benefit for the use of shipping companies and port authorities.

Building complex event processing capability for intelligent environmental monitoring

Rapid evolution of Internet-of-Things is driving the increased deployment of smart sensors in environmental applications, contributing to many big data characteristics of environmental monitoring. Most of the current environmental monitoring systems are not designed to handle real-time datastreams, and the best practices for datastream processing and predictive analytics are yet to be established. This work presents a complex event processing (CEP) engine for detecting anomalies in real time, and demonstrates it using a series of real monitoring data from the geological carbon sequestration domain. We show that the service-based CEP engine is instrumental for enabling environmental intelligent monitoring systems to ingest heterogeneous datastreams with scalable performance. Our CEP framework requires minimal coding from the user and can be easily extended to other similar environmental monitoring applications.

A Mobile Greenhouse Environment Monitoring System Based on the Internet of Things

A knowledge of the environmental information of different spaces of large greenhouse is a prerequisite for effective control, and multipoint monitoring is therefore needed. In view of the problems of current greenhouse environmental monitoring, a mobile greenhouse environment monitoring system was designed based on the Internet of Things. A four-layer system architecture with outstanding motion control functions was constructed that uses mobile acquisition rather than multiple sensing nodes to realize the automatic collection of greenhouse environmental information and capture pictures of the crops with low cost. In this study, a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino chip were combined for the first time in agriculture greenhouse environmental monitoring, with the former serving as the data server and the latter as the master chip for the mobile system. Firstly, the application layer server was deployed on the Raspberry Pi, secondly, due to its compact size and stable performance, Raspberry Pi and sensors etc. were all integrated into the mobile system, shortening the physical distance between the data acquisition end and the data processing end, and serial communication was used. In addition, a dedicated communication protocol with Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) checking was designed to reduce data loss at the transmission layer. The data was denoised using a limiting filtering algorithm and a weighted average filtering algorithm to improve quality of the data. The experimental results show that the system can effectively realize multi-point environmental monitoring of the greenhouse.

Land use Detection in Nusajaya using Higher-Order Modified Geodesic Active Contour Model

Urban development is a global phenomenon. In Johor, especially Nusajaya is one of the most rapidly developing cities. This is due to the increase of land demand and population growth. Moreover, land-use changes are considered to be one of the major components of current environmental monitoring strategies. In this context, image segmentation and mathematical model offers essential tools that can be used to analyze land use detection. The image segmentation process is known as the most important and difficult task in image analysis. Nonlinear fourth-order models had shown to have a good achievement in recovering smooth regions. Therefore, these motivate us to propose a fourth-order modified geodesic active contour (GAC) model. In the proposed model, a modified signed pressure force (SPF) function has been defined to segment the inhomogeneous satellite images. The simulations of the fourth-order modified GAC model through some numerical methods based on the higher-order finite difference method (FDM) have been illustrated. Matlab R2015a software in Windows 7 Ultimate on Intel (R) Core (TM) i5-3230M @ 2.60GHz CPU with 8 GB RAM has been considered as a computational platform for the simulation. Qualitative and quantitative differences between modified SPF functions and other SPF functions have been shown as a comparison. Hence land use detection is very useful for local governments and urban planners to enhance the future sustainable development plans of Nusajaya.

Distributed intelligent urban environment monitoring system

The current environmental pollution and destruction have developed into a world-wide major social problem that threatens human survival and development. Environmental monitoring is the prerequisite and basis of environmental governance, but overall, the current environmental monitoring system is facing a series of problems. Based on the electrochemical sensor, this paper designs a small, low-cost, easy to layout urban environmental quality monitoring terminal, and multi-terminal constitutes a distributed network. The system has been small-scale demonstration applications and has confirmed that the system is suitable for large-scale promotion