https://gwf.usask.ca/projects-facilities/all-projects/p1-wq-monitoring.php

Many watersheds and water sources both in Canada and across the world are under stress due to human activity as well as climate change. Population growth in urban areas as well as agricultural practices and resource extraction tend to introduce pollutants such as nutrients, metals, microorganisms, pharmaceuticals, industrial waste products and other emerging contaminants into watersheds. These water quality issues are further exacerbated by climate change and other environmental changes in watersheds.

This project aims to gain an understanding of the effect of human activities on the ecosystem and water through the development and use of low-cost sensors and sensing systems that can be deployed in the environment to monitor for the presence of contaminants and their variation over short and long time scales.

Although sensors and sensing systems for long term monitoring exist for many of the parameters of interest (such as dissolved oxygen, pH, turbidity, conductivity, nitrates), they are not sufficiently low in cost and require technical expertise for operation and maintenance. In other cases such as some metals, phosphates and bacteria, continuous monitoring systems have yet to be developed.

This project focuses on:
1) The development of low-cost sensing systems and its implementation for long term monitoring of water quality parameters; and
2) The development of low cost sensors specialized for the detection of pathogens, heavy metals, oxidants, and nutrients (and these will be integrated with the sensing system).