WaterWebTools

Dejligt at se stor interesse for hvordan man kan måle E.coli bakterier i realtid. På DANVA Dansk Vandkonference i denne uge præsenterede Anders Nielsen et projekt med DIN Forsyning og Esbjerg Kommune, hvor vi tester en ny type sensor, og resultaterne ser meget lovende ud. I praksis samles realtids data fra E.coli sensoren, vandstand, klima mm. i WaterWebTools portalen, hvor vi har forsøgt at målrette udstillingen af data til lige netop det behov de har hos forsyningen og kommunen. Der var mange gode og relevante spørgsmål til Anders og Anders Hestbech fra DIN Forsyning efter oplægget. Hvis du sidder med et godt spørgsmål, som du ikke lige nåede at få svar på, så skriv endelig - vi vil rigtig gerne dele ud af de erfaringer der nu er gjort. Dennis Trolle, Anders Lehmann, Christopher N., Anders Nielsen

On the road again. In Denmark, Autumn = exhibition season. During the past couple of weeks, we have therefore been busy travelling to conferences and exhibitions. As a small and still young company, it is clear that even though you feel you have a unique and superb solution catalogue, which can give actionable insights into critical water issues and save time, money and in some cases lives of livestock and people, the stuff is not automatically and easily taken up by the society and market. Telling the story behind, educating and training people on how to use the technology is super important. Luckily, this aspect is also something we greatly enjoy at WaterITech. We have just been part of a proud sponsor team for the Danish Water & Environment conference #vandmiljøkonferencen during 24-25. October in Vejle, which was co-organized by SEGES Innovation, Danmarks Naturfredningsforening, KL, Velas and Limfjordsrådet. Here, participants could visit our booth and get to know us and our solutions. We then attended the Danish water export day at Grundfos, co-organized by the Danish Export Association, on 28. October in Bjerringbro, sharing our experiences with, and learning from, other large and small water tech companies with focus on exporting our technology to international markets. Then another exhibition together with Grundfos Foundation | PDJF as part of the Grundfos prize expo on 6. November in Bjerringbro, where we showcased our digital twin set up for monitoring and modelling the health of aquatic ecosystems. And yesterday, 8. November, we were part of the Global Youth Climate Summit at Klimatorium - Danmarks Internationale Klimacenter in Lemvig - together with Naturvidenskabernes Hus, GRUNDFOS, Danish Hydraulic Institute and ESA-astronaut Andreas Mogensen. This was a truly inspiring day, where about 500 primary and high-school students attended during the day. We had the pleasure of running hands-on sessions for around 60 high-school students, where they learned how computer models can be used to assess the impacts of future climate change on our aquatic ecosystems. Using our WaterWebTools webplatform, they realized that you do not need to be a tech wizard, or a highly specialized computer scientist, to be able to utilize the latest modelling technology. In fact, they we are able to generate a “future proof” water action plan for a Danish lake, where the nutrient load targets factor in a future warming of 2 degrees. Well done!   If you have not yet had the chance to meet us, you can still catch us at our final major outreach event this year at the Danish Water Conference organized by DANVA during 27-28. November in Kolding. Here, Anders Nielsen will present our ongoing project with DIN Forsyning and Esbjerg Kommune on real-time monitoring of E.coli bacteria – and how this can support management decisions, and ultimately help reduce the amount of beach closure days, thereby generating value for visitors and the local economy.

After months of concept development and coding, we now have a fully operational metabolism model, which can be plugged into our data buoy, and used in lakes, estuaries and rivers. The concept has just been presented in Aktuel Naturvidenskab (https://lnkd.in/g8yBit5M), and demonstrated for Lake Ormstrup, which is currently being restored in a project funded by Grundfos Foundation | PDJF.   Metabolism is a fundamental property of aquatic ecosystems, and describes the turnover of biomass and energy. Why is this relevant for you?   Metabolism is super interesting and highly relevant as it is a good indicator for the overall health of an ecosystem. It can be derived from durable dissolved oxygen sensors – in this case we used OPTOD sensors from Aqualabo (thanks Yoann Fournier for facilitating this). Metabolism is expressed through the overall primary production and respiration of all organisms in the ecosystem, ranging from bacteria and algae to fish and whales. These rates are typically higher in turbid, nutrient rich systems, compared to clear water systems with a higher biodiversity. Following the metabolism of an ecosystem over time can therefore be used to track the health trajectory of the system, and whether this is improving or deteriorating. And we have now made this a lot easier!   Metabolism can be derived from a combination of oxygen data and relatively complex computer modelling. This approach has until now have been limited to small specialist groups within the scientific community. At WaterITech we have now changed this. In fact, making otherwise technical and difficult scientific insights useful and easily applied in real-world applications is one of the core reasons we founded WaterITech and the WaterWebTools Platform in the first place.   We have made the new metabolism model operational via the WaterWebTools Portal. When a new data buoy is launched in the field, we can therefore start deriving metabolism immediately. This will give you real-time insights into the system, as well as the ability to follow the system over longer time – you simply go to the WaterWebTools Portal and get access to processed data and awesome visualizations.   The solution is highly relevant for following effects of management interventions, including f.x. the big landscape changes soon to be initiated in Denmark by Jeppe Bruus and Ministeriet for Grøn Trepart – the metabolism insights can help us understand whether the interventions actually work as planned, which works the best, and why this could be? Interested in getting a metabolism buoy? Check out our website at wateritech.com/data-buoy, and also feel free to reach out to learn more about the solution. You can also use your phone or a laptop to check out a real-life metabolism example for a Danish Lake right here: https://lnkd.in/gSTNPdCk (click on screen icon at right hand side to view metabolism output).

We are looking for SWMM storm water model collaborators… Making real-time data processing and predictive modelling easy, useful and helpful is what the WaterWebTools platform is all about. We are transitioning into using our third generation of the platform, which is already now in use by several of our users. The new platform brings several advances, including the ability to work seamlessly with huge map datasets in the user’s browser, a new scalable cloud-based execution of our data processing and modelling workflows, and a new and much more flexible software pipeline. This makes it much easier for us to integrate new data processing and modelling workflows – including f.x. real-time execution of the open source SWMM model. But as a user you do not need to worry about these technical details – new features and functionalities will simply become available to you on the webplatform. The platform can combine real-time sensor data with predictive hydrological, hydraulics and water quality models. This effectively facilitates the development of digital twins, which can be used in support for predictive maintenance, sewer overflow documentation, flood warning, water quality compliance checks and much more. We are currently looking into real-time execution of the SWMM storm water model, including making this updateable and adjustable by users through the platform. The main idea is to make mandatory yearly overflow reporting much easier and more precise, and also enable real-time surveillance and quality control of IoT storm water sensors. Interested? We are looking for collaborators that could be interested in real-time SWMM modelling. Perhaps you are from a water utility, and already work with the SWMM model. Perhaps you are dealing with time consuming overflow reporting. If you are interested, we would like to have an informal and non-binding conversion with you. Then please get in touch with us by email (dt@wateritech.com) or use our online form right here: https://lnkd.in/dU79hbqc

The most recent forecast produced by our digital twin of Lake Ormstrup suggests that the last remains of summer stratification and hypoxia (in this case low oxygen in the bottom-most layers of the lake) will literally be blown away this week. As we transition into autumn, the lake is becoming fully mixed. At the same time, the restoration of the lake - by removal of nutrient rich bottom sediment - is also moving into the final stages. Next year will indicate if the restoration was successful. We have high hopes, as submerged vegetation has already appeared in places where they have previously been absent. Virtual experiments with our digital twin also suggest that - if we succeed in removing up to 90% of the bioavailable nutrients in the bottom sediments - hypoxia extent will be greatly reduced, and the lake can transition into a nice clear-water state. The project is funded by Grundfos Foundation | PDJF and you can learn more about it right here: https://lnkd.in/d4it_J8v

Even shallow lakes stratify! In fact, they can stratify quite often - sometimes with dire consequences for the life they support. Warming from a couple of nice sunny days with low wind speeds can oftentimes be enough to cause stratification in shallow lakes. For nutrient rich lakes, hypoxia (low oxygen) in the bottom waters can form shortly after the onset of stratification - forcing much of the aquatic life in a lake to move upwards to a more oxygen rich habitat. In some bad cases, we see severe fish kills, where oxygen levels are low from top to bottom of the water column - leaving no room to escape hypoxia. An event of stratification, followed by hypoxia formation and then complete water column mixing can be short-lived in shallow lakes, and typically span from a single day to a few weeks. Traditional water sampling, such as that carried out to comply with the EU Water Framework Directive, will very often not be sufficient to capture these short-lived events. Sampling is typically carried out once per month, or bi-weekly at the most. But to capture these short-lived events, you need high-frequency data – for example data collected automatically every 15 min. through sensors installed on a floating buoy. The picture shows an example of high-frequency oxygen profiles recorded by a data buoy this summer in a typical shallow (max depth 2.6 m) Danish lake. Having such sensor system installed and running operationally through WaterWebTools can help you understand the system dynamics much better, including identifying whether an observed fish kill was caused by hypoxia, or due to other factors. If you would like to learn more about how a sensor system can be designed by WaterITech and installed in your system, please feel free to reach out, or check out our website at: https://lnkd.in/dYyeWwBR. 

We are currently working on the final touches on our third generation of the WaterWebTools Platform. The updated platform includes several advances, some of which have been made possible through, and specifically for, the MERLIN and SMARTLAGOON projects, including: 1) the ability to work seamlessly with huge map datasets of continental and global scales, as well as the more local site maps, 2) coupling to our new data processing back-end, which is where we operationalize models and IoT sensor-data for real-time insights and forecasting. Would you like to see? Then take a look at the portal right here: https://lnkd.in/dmzndzqY, where you can find some of the data produced in MERLIN, the most recent ecological status of rivers in all of Europe, and much more.

Fantastic news. Happy to see that the data produced by our live sensor systems are used and valued, and can help people decide on where to go for a nice warm swim. If you would also like a live sensor system for your lake or beach just let us know - we can tailor the solution to your needs and can deploy everything from our simple temperature sensors to our advanced metabolism water quality system.

Well done Cecilie, and thank you for sharing.

Climate change including warmer temperatures can allow aquatic species to gradually expand their range into habitats that are currently too cold. But species can also be introduced rapidly as invasive species to an area by boat ballast water, accidental release, and quite often, by people.   A recent example of an invasion is the spreading of quagga mussels in the iconic Lake Geneva. These effective filter feeding mussels were first detected in Switzerland in 2014, and have now found their way to numerous rivers and are also found in Lakes Biel, Constance and Geneva. The mussels have the potential to bring about changes to the physical environment by changing underwater light conditions, and also the entire food web. Research by Prof. Bastiaan Ibelings and colleagues suggests that this rapid expansion has the potential to lead to the greatest change in the aquatic ecosystem of Lake Geneva since eutrophication (nutrient enrichment).   But to better understand how the mussels could influence both the physical and biogeochemical environment of Lake Geneva, a holistic model of the lake that describes physical as well as biogeochemical dynamics is needed. Such model would allow large scale virtual experiments, and help us better understand what could be in store for Lake Geneva. This is where we come in at WaterITech.   Developing and applying advanced computer models to understand the impacts of climate change and human interventions on aquatic ecosystems is at the core of what we do. We often produce forecasts tailored specifically to an individual lake, reservoir or river system. While the future projections for the health of aquatic ecosystems are often worrisome, it is not all bad news, and often the models can help us understand what we can do to alleviate or even diminish the expected impacts of climate change and invasions.   Bas Ibelings and his group has just been awarded a new project funded by the Velux Foundation in Switzerland. The project seeks to better understand the role of quaggas in Lake Geneva. In this project, we have been trusted with developing a new mussel module for the open source Water Ecosystems Tool (WET), which will then be applied to Lake Geneva. Just like all our other developments to WET, the new module will be open source and freely available to all. If you would like to learn more, and perhaps interested in trying out the new features yourself, or would like our assistance on a modelling project, please feel free to reach out.