There is an increasing social demand of citizens to increase the quality of life by re-establishing urban bathing areas. Several cities, like Berlin, often achieve excellent water quality levels for their urban rivers and propose swimming areas at the heart of the city. However, surveillance and management systems have to be installed since stormwater and CSO discharges can compromise the quality for bathing or recreational uses in urban waters.
Recent innovations have emerged aiming at overcoming the limitations of the current monitoring protocols to guarantee microbial safety: innovative monitoring devices such as mobile PCR, in-situ sampling and cultivation, enzyme-based techniques; new modelling approaches as in DWC (https://www.digital-water.city/).
There, a machine-learning based early warning system for predicting bathing water quality is combined with a FIWARE compatible open-source software interface that enables to predict bacterial concentration at specific river sections using a set of local data such as rainfall, river flow, temperature and water quality.
In this context Water Europe, DWC and further EU projects as ibathwater are organizing a workshop during the Water Knowledge Europe 2021 to highlight the latest developments in this field, namely on online sensors, machine learning, process-based models and mobile apps, and promote the DWC early-warning system.
You will find below a survey and would like to ask you kindly to fill it up to help us for the preparation of the workshop.