Cam/Wellow Living Lab
The Challenge: Cam/Wellow water quality has been recently assessed by EA as poor in terms of high nutrient levels, organic contaminants and biodiversity loss. Cam/Wellow Partnership co-creation workshop (hosted by WW) recognized lack of comprehensive data/evidence collection tools spanning all sectors (communal, agricultural and industrial) as the key challenge in establishing effective interventions to achieve good ecological status of the catchment.
Project co-creation: Cohort 1 will work with WW, BART, EA, TDL to develop tools (PhD1: omics, PhD2: sensors, PhD3: IoW) aimed at establishing a digital One Health Platform that will be transferable and tested in other Living Labs.
Conwy Living Lab
The Challenge: The Conwy River, estuary and coastal zones suffer from severe microbial pollution from agriculture, wastewater, septic tank and hospital discharges. Contamination has been causally linked to disease outbreaks (e.g. Norovirus, Hepatitis) via water-based recreation and shellfish consumption. Finding new ways to monitor pathogens, model their dispersal/fate and predict human exposure risk is a major challenge.
Project co-creation: Cohort 1 will work with DCWW, NRW, PHW, NFU-Cymru to test new omic-based approaches to pathogen surveillance (PhD1), develop new AI-driven pathogen exposure risk modelling tools (PhD2), identify how extreme events will affect future water quantity and quality (PhD3).
Taff-Ely Living Lab
The challenge: Pollutant concentrations in Cardiff Bay which receives water from the Taff and Ely, reflect how multiple inputs of pollutants aggregate as the river flows to the sea. Little is known on how pollutant concentrations vary from source to sea.
Project co-creation: Cohort 1 will collaborate with the Rivers Trust. Three PhDs will follow three different markers – one from transport activities (e.g. a metal), one from domestic wastewater (e.g. pharmaceutical) and one from farming/gardening (e.g pesticide) – to understand how catchment land use and activities affect pollutant concentrations from source to sea.
Exe/Tamar/Dart Living Lab
The challenge: There are poor water quality issues (coliform/pathogen counts and agrochemicals) associated with discharges into the Exe, Tamar and Dart which impact the local shellfish industries, bathing water quality and biodiversity.
Project co-creation: Cohort 1 will develop with SWW, AZ, WRT, JNCC and apply tools (PhD1: chemical analysis of the CSOs compared with treated wastewater effluents, PhD2: molecular sequencing to assess microbiological content and bioassays with algae, invertebrates and fish of (un)treated wastewater effluents, PhD3: in-field ecological analyses and modelling to assess the impact of CSOs on invertebrate populations across chosen catchments)