The Water Sector Was Born and Raised with Big-Impact Water Data

Abstract

For thousands of years, data allowed societies to first understand the connection between water quality and public health and later to refine water and waste management strategies. In this commentary, we look at the past, present, and future of 'big-impact' data in the water sector, from ancient water systems to Paris' valorization of wastes, London's tribulations with cholera, and modern environmental standards for the protection of public and environmental health. We continue the journey of water data with emerging applications in understanding our water resources, including blue-green city planning, understanding water use trends in remote areas, water resource monitoring, and wastewater epidemiology. We conclude with a foray into the future of the water sector, where proactively managing water resources to ensure equitable and resilient water access can be informed by remote sensing, satellite-based monitoring, and machine learning. By understanding how water data revolutionized our societies in the past, we aim to inspire the use of big water data to open possibilities for managing urban and environmental water in our future.

Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Analytics in Water Environments

“…The special issue includes several review articles encompassing a wide spectrum, ranging from a historical perspective of water data to computational modeling in wastewater treatment to ML modeling of environmental chemical reactions, environmental toxicology, heavy metal removal, and cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (HABs) . One significant application of these innovative tools is ML-assisted environmental monitoring, which can address diverse problems, such as predicting effluent nutrients or influent flow rates and nutrient loads at wastewater treatment plants, , formation of disinfection byproducts, drivers of the accumulation of potentially toxic elements in sediments, greenhouse gas emissions, , occurrence of PFAS, water quality assessment, microplastics, microcystins, and differentiation of landfill leachate and domestic sludge .…”