The European Groundwater Directive could be improved by limiting the scopes of the Annexes I and II to the manmade and natural substances, respectively, and by defining a common monitoring protocol. The changes in the European landuse patterns, in particular the urban sprawl phenomena, obscure the distinction between the point and diffuse sources of contamination. In the future more importance ...

Background The Sediment Quality Objectives (SQO) indirect effects assessment determines whether sediments meet California’s narrative SQO for human health: Pollutants shall not be present in sediments at levels that will bioaccumulate in aquatic life to levels that are harmful to human health. This program determines whether sediment contamination at a site results in an unacceptable health ris...

Water quality data collection in shallow water areas can be a challenging task. Obstacles encountered in such environments include difficulty in covering large territories and the presence of inaccessible areas due to a variety of reasons such as a soft bottom or contamination. There is also a high probability of disturbing the test area while placing the sensors. This paper describes a NASA-fu...

Atrazine has been identified in at least 20 of the 1,636 hazardous waste sites that have been proposed for inclusion on the EPA National Priorities List (NPL) (HazDat 2003). However, the number of sites evaluated for atrazine is not known. The frequency for these sites within the United States can be seen in Figure 6-1. Of these sites, all 20 are located within the United States and none are lo...

The serious arsenic contamination of groundwater in Bangladesh has come out recently as the biggest natural calamity in the world. The people in 59 out of 64 districts comprising 126,134 km of Bangladesh are suffering due to the arsenic contamination in drinking water. Seventy five million people are at risk and 24 million are potentially exposed to arsenic contamination. Most of the recognized...

Water distribution systems can be vulnerable to microbial contamination through cross-connections, wastewater backflow, the intrusion of soiled water after a loss of pressure resulting from an electricity blackout, natural disaster, or intentional contamination of the system in a bioterrrorism event. The most urgent matter a water treatment utility would face in this situation is detecting the ...

Mycotoxins, as microbial secondary metabolites, frequently contaminate cereal grains and pose a serious threat to human and animal health around the globe. Deoxynivalenol (DON), a commonly detected Fusarium mycotoxin, has drawn utmost attention due to high exposure levels and contamination frequency in the food chain. Biological control is emerging as a promising technology for the management o...