DEPLOY: Smart Demonstration of Online Water Quality Monitoring on the River Lee, Cork, Ireland

Abstract

The DEPLOY project was a successful technology demonstration, showcasing how state-of-the-art technology can be used to achieve continuous, real-time monitoring of a river catchment. The project involved the collection of in-situ environmental data over a period of 12 months from a network of stations located in the River Lee Catchment, in Co. Cork. DEPLOY has demonstrated that this technology can be used to track fluctuations in a number of water quality parameters such as temperature, dissolved oxygen and pH across a catchment. This, in turn, has demonstrated the benefits of this approach over more traditional means of monitoring that are likely to miss much of the temporal variability associated with these parameters. This technology demonstration of a truly heterogeneous water quality monitoring networked system was one of the first of its kind in Ireland and showed how data could be collected from a number of locations and viewed in real or near real time. DEPLOY represented an important collaboration among research centres, the National Centre for Sensor Research (NCSR) at Dublin City University (DCU), and the Tyndall National Institute (TNI), commercial partner Intelligent Data Systems and the relevant River Basin District (the South Western River Basin District). The assembled project team had the technical and analytical expertise to successfully deploy, maintain, continuously collect environmental and water quality data and evaluate the effects of long-term sensor deployment on water quality monitoring systems and sensor data from a number of sites. The findings were then disseminated to the widest possible audience through the project website (http:// www.deploy.ie). While the potential of this technology is clear, the DEPLOY project also identified a number of gaps, particularly in the area of in-situ nutrient analysis. Further technological development in this area will be required if the goal of achieving a complete in-situ water quality monitoring solution is to be achieved. DEPLOY is a technology demonstration project that began planning, station selection and design in August 2008. It aimed to show how state-of-the-art technology could be implemented for cost-effective, continuous, real-time monitoring of a river catchment. The DEPLOY project is seen as an important building block in the realisation of a wide-area autonomous network of sensors capable of monitoring the spatial and temporal distribution of important water quality and environmental target parameters. The deployment demonstrates SN capability in collecting real-time water quality data and can act as a test bed to implement and evaluate water quality monitoring systems and deployment infrastructure (wireless data transfer mechanisms, novel sensors, sensor interfacing, etc.).