Resilient Water Systems: Integrating Environmental Sensor Networks and Real-Time Forecasting to Adaptively Manage Drinking Water Quality and Build Social Trust
1737424 (Carey). The freshwater lakes and reservoirs that provide the majority of Americans with their drinking water face increasing threats to water quality. Nutrient pollution, contaminants, and land use change can lead to low oxygen concentrations and algal blooms, which can result in elevated metal concentrations, fish and bird kills, thick algal scums, noxious odors, and overall toxic water unsafe for drinking. These adverse outcomes may be prevented if drinking water managers have the information needed to act preemptively. To increase the resilience of water supplies, this project will develop a smart water system that integrates smart and connected (S&C) technology and adaptive management to ensure safe drinking water for communities. The smart water system will consist of sensor networks embedded in a drinking water reservoir to reduce delays and enhance feedbacks between the detection of water quality degradation and decisive management action to mitigate such threats. This increased capacity to ensure sustained water quality can in turn build both public confidence and meaningful engagement with drinking water institutions. This project will connect the networks of high-frequency sensors with secure cyberinfrastructure to develop innovative, real-time water quality prediction models and tools for more effective management. Finally, these models will be used to educate local residents and students about the use of S&CC technology to manage their drinking water.
By embedding an integrated sensor network in a drinking water reservoir, this project integrates expertise from nine disciplines to study the complete feedback loop of how S&C technologies can improve drinking water management, water quality, and ultimately community well-being. The project will use novel sensor technology to monitor a drinking water supply reservoir and its catchment, and to develop and evaluate a new model-data fusion approach that will advance the field of environmental forecasting. These forecasts will be used to create decision-making tools for reservoir managers that will be evaluated for their usability. In addition, teaching materials will be developed to create a curriculum that exposes high school students to data emerging from S&C technology and increase their interest in and preparedness for careers in STEM. Finally, the project will assess public perception of the adoption and use of S&CC technologies by utilities to improve drinking water quality as well as the relationship between this perception, trust in the utility, and acceptance of the S&CC technology. This enhanced understanding and confidence may lead to increased social capital, permitting an evaluation of the degree to which S&CC technologies can increase both ecosystem resilience of drinking water quality in supply reservoirs and community resilience by increasing the public's trust in their water systems.
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Performance PeriodJanuary 2018 - December 2021
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Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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Award Number1737424
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Lead PICayelan Carey -
Co-PIQuinn Thomas
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Co-PIRenato Figueiredo
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Co-PIMadeline Schreiber
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Co-PIMichael Sorice
Project Material
- Reservoir Drawdown Highlights the Emergent Effects of Water Level Change on Reservoir Physics, Chemistry, and Biology
- Anoxia begets anoxia: A positive feedback to the deoxygenation of temperate lakes
- Effects of Hypoxia on Coupled Carbon and Iron Cycling Differ Between Weekly and Multiannual Timescales in Two Freshwater Reservoirs
- Eddy Covariance Data Reveal That a Small Freshwater Reservoir Emits a Substantial Amount of Carbon Dioxide and Methane
- Anoxia decreases the magnitude of the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus sink in freshwaters
- Whole‐ecosystem oxygenation experiments reveal substantially greater hypolimnetic methane concentrations in reservoirs during anoxia
- Using near‐term forecasts and uncertainty partitioning to inform prediction of oligotrophic lake cyanobacterial density
- Increased adoption of best practices in ecological forecasting enables comparisons of forecastability
- Predicting the effects of climate change on freshwater cyanobacterial blooms requires consideration of the complete cyanobacterial life cycle
- Relative importance of top‐down vs. bottom‐up control of lake phytoplankton vertical distributions varies among fluorescence‐based spectral groups
- Macrosystems EDDIE teaching modules significantly increase ecology students' proficiency and confidence working with ecosystem models and use of systems thinking
- A Near‐Term Iterative Forecasting System Successfully Predicts Reservoir Hydrodynamics and Partitions Uncertainty in Real Time
- Differential Responses of Maximum Versus Median Chlorophyll‐ <i>a</i> to Air Temperature and Nutrient Loads in an Oligotrophic Lake Over 31 Years
- Causes and consequences of changing oxygen availability in lakes: Kilham Plenary Lecture Article
- High-frequency sensor data capture short-term variability in Fe and Mn concentrations due to hypolimnetic oxygenation and seasonal dynamics in a drinking water reservoir
- Near‐term forecasts of <scp>NEON</scp> lakes reveal gradients of environmental predictability across the <scp>US</scp>
- Experimental thermocline deepening alters vertical distribution and community structure of phytoplankton in a 4‐year whole‐reservoir manipulation
- Near‐term phytoplankton forecasts reveal the effects of model time step and forecast horizon on predictability
- Advancing lake and reservoir water quality management with near-term, iterative ecological forecasting
- Iterative Forecasting Improves Near-Term Predictions of Methane Ebullition Rates
- Edge-to-cloud Virtualized Cyberinfrastructure for Near Real-time Water Quality Forecasting in Lakes and Reservoirs
- Ecosystem-Scale Oxygen Manipulations Alter Terminal Electron Acceptor Pathways in a Eutrophic Reservoir
- Macrosystems EDDIE Teaching Modules Increase Students’ Ability to Define, Interpret, and Apply Concepts in Macrosystems Ecology
- Variability in fluorescent dissolved organic matter concentrations across diel to seasonal time scales is driven by water temperature and meteorology in a eutrophic reservoir
- How Perceptions of Trust, Risk, Tap Water Quality, and Salience Characterize Drinking Water Choices
- Under-ice respiration rates shift the annual carbon cycle in the mixed layer of an oligotrophic lake from autotrophy to heterotrophy
- Relative Performance of 1-D Versus 3-D Hydrodynamic, Water-Quality Models for Predicting Water Temperature and Oxygen in a Shallow, Eutrophic, Managed Reservoir
- Iron and manganese fluxes across the sediment-water interface in a drinking water reservoir
- Ecosystem-scale nutrient cycling responses to increasing air temperatures vary with lake trophic state
- The Magnitude and Drivers of Methane Ebullition and Diffusion Vary on a Longitudinal Gradient in a Small Freshwater Reservoir
- Perspective: Advancing the research agenda for improving understanding of cyanobacteria in a future of global change
- Physics-Guided Architecture (PGA) of Neural Networks for Quantifying Uncertainty in Lake Temperature Modeling
- Hypolimnetic Hypoxia Increases the Biomass Variability and Compositional Variability of Crustacean Zooplankton Communities
- Enhancing collaboration between ecologists and computer scientists: lessons learned and recommendations forward
- Whole-Ecosystem Experiments Reveal Varying Responses of Phytoplankton Functional Groups to Epilimnetic Mixing in a Eutrophic Reservoir
- In situ fluorometry reveals a persistent, perennial hypolimnetic cyanobacterial bloom in a seasonally anoxic reservoir
- Metalimnetic oxygen minima alter the vertical profiles of carbon dioxide and methane in a managed freshwater reservoir
- Power, pitfalls, and potential for integrating computational literacy into undergraduate ecology courses
- The effects of hypolimnetic anoxia on the diel vertical migration of freshwater crustacean zooplankton
- Effectiveness of a bubble-plume mixing system for managing phytoplankton in lakes and reservoirs
- <i>Chaoborus</i> spp. Transport CH <sub>4</sub> from the Sediments to the Surface Waters of a Eutrophic Reservoir, But Their Contribution to Water Column CH <sub>4</sub> Concentrations and Diffusive Efflux Is Minor
- Oxygen dynamics control the burial of organic carbon in a eutrophic reservoir: Oxygen dynamics control OC burial
Dr. Carey's research integrates population, community, and ecosystem ecology to examine how natural and anthropogenic perturbations affect freshwater systems. A current research focus is on understanding how feedbacks between microbial and plankton taxa, food webs, and nutrient cycling can mediate ecosystem resilience to eutrophication and climate change. We work across lakes, reservoirs, and streams, and use models, field experiments, and long-term data analysis to determine how stressors affect both biological communities and ecosystem services.