Modelling the seasonal impacts of a wastewater treatment plant on water quality in a Mediterranean stream using microbial indicators

Autor: Eugènia Martí, Daniel Nadal-Sala, Francesc Sabater, Anicet R. Blanch, Cristina García-Aljaro, Santi Sabaté, Elisenda Ballesté, Miriam Pascual-Benito, Francisco Lucena, Marta Tobella, Carles Gracia
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Wet season
Mediterranean climate
Microbial source tracking
Environmental Engineering
0208 environmental biotechnology
Context (language use)
02 engineering and technology
010501 environmental sciences
Management
Monitoring
Policy and Law
Wastewater
Plantes de tractament d'aigües residuals
01 natural sciences
Faecal pollution
Water balance
Microbial indicators
Feces
Streamflow
Water Quality
Dry season
Escherichia coli
Humans
Explotació de recursos hidràulics
Waste Management and Disposal
Effluent
Water resources development
0105 earth and related environmental sciences
Hydrology
Contaminació de l'aigua
Self-depuration distance
Bayes Theorem
General Medicine
Clostridia
020801 environmental engineering
Microbial inactivation
Water pollution
Environmental science
Sewage disposal plant
Environmental drivers
Water quality
Bifidobacterium
Seasons
Water Microbiology
Environmental Monitoring
Zdroj: Digital.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
instname
ISSN: 1095-8630
Popis: Faecal pollution modelling is a valuable tool to evaluate and improve water management strategies, especially in a context of water scarcity. The reduction dynamics of five faecal indicator organisms (E. coli, spores of sulphite-reducing clostridia, somatic coliphages, GA17 bacteriophages and a human-specific Bifidobacterium molecular marker) were assessed in an intermittent Mediterranean stream affected by a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). Using Bayesian inverse modelling, the decay rates of each indicator were correlated with two environmental drivers (temperature and streamflow downstream of the WWTP) and the generated model was used to evaluate the self-depuration distance (SDD) of the stream. A consistent increase of 1–2 log10 in the concentration of all indicators was detected after the discharge of the WWTP effluent. The decay rates showed seasonal variation, reaching a maximum in the dry season, when SDDs were also shorter and the stream had a higher capacity to self-depurate. High seasonality was observed for all faecal indicators except for the spores of sulphite-reducing clostridia. The maximum SDD ranged from 3 km for the spores of sulphite-reducing clostridia during the dry season and 15 km for the human-specific Bifidobacterium molecular marker during the wet season. The SDD provides a single standardized metric that integrates and compares different contamination indicators. It could be extended to other Mediterranean drainage basins and has the potential to integrate changes in land use and catchment water balance, a feature that will be especially useful in the transient climate conditions expected in the coming years.
This work was supported by Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad MEDSOUL project ( CGL2014-59977-C3-1-R ) and the Catalan government ( 2017 SGR 170 ). M. P–B and D. N–S are supported by a FPI grant of the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad ( BES-2015-072112 and BES-2015-072983 respectively).
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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