Water is abundantly present in our lives — drinking fountains and showers, garden sprinklers, swimming pools, reservoirs and streams — that it can become invisible, always in sight but often out of mind. Yet, contamination risks can endanger that abundance. August is National Water Quality Month, a time to contemplate conserving natural water sources and consider what households and communities can do to ensure and preserve access to clean, safe water.
Clean water poured into a glass. Image courtesy Pixabay.Many researchers at Virginia Tech pursue this goal, whether through teaching communities how to detect problems and protect their water sources, pioneering new approaches to removing pollutants, or even seeking new understanding of how water moves across the ocean floors. To schedule an interview with any of the researchers below, please contact mediarelations@vt.edu.
Reducing forever chemicals and contaminants
Leigh-Anne Krometis and Erin Ling lead projects examining private water supplies such as wells, concentrating on contaminants like bacteria, arsenic, and PFAS, or forever chemicals. Krometis, a professor and Turner Faculty Fellow of Biological Systems Engineering for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Ling, coordinator of the Virginia Household Water Quality Program, have also studied contaminating metals found in plumbing like lead and copper. Krometis has additional projects focused on bottled water reliance and other coping behaviors like reliance on roadside springs in rural Appalachia, as well as home water and sanitation access and wastewater surveillance in the rural United States.
Managing water sources in new ways
Cities have long treated stormwater, wastewater, and drinking water as siloed entities, but the Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory, led by Stanley Grant, is on a mission to change that through a new concept called “One Water” that is gaining momentum among urban water practitioners. Implementing this novel approach could be essential to meeting new Environmental Protection Agency standards for the reduction of PFAS, or forever chemicals, in drinking water.
“We are aiming to stop thinking of water as three separate things and start treating it all as a single resource,” said Grant. “This will take innovative methods and technologies to tackle water quality challenges as a unified system.”
Grant and assistant professor Megan Rippy are also working to address freshwater salt pollution. Many human activities, such as applying salt to roads and sidewalks in the winter, worsen the pollution, which threatens safe drinking water and leads to declines in biodiversity and critical freshwater habitats. “If we don’t figure out how to reverse this trend of salt pollution soon, it may become one of our nation’s top environmental challenges,” Grant said.
Advancing water management in rural settings
Alasdair Cohen conducts research on drinking water — contamination, treatment, and supply — and health outcomes, especially in the Central Appalachian region. Cohen, an assistant professor of environmental epidemiology in the Department of Population Health Sciences and the Public Health Program in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, explained that “our research group’s overarching goal is to help advance programs and policies for improving drinking water, sanitation, and health in rural and lower-income settings.”
Empowering communities through technology
Cholera afflicts millions annually, especially in regions with poor sanitation and water infrastructure. Working with a community in rural Bangladesh, Kevin Boyle from Virginia Tech, in collaboration with researchers from Moravian University, Penn State, and the University of Rhode Island, developed an Android-based smartphone app that delivers real-time cholera risk forecasts to households. By utilizing NASA satellite data, CholeraMap predicts cholera risks based on factors like rainfall, temperature, and historical incidence. The app creates a model that could assist in similar regions worldwide.
Training communities to protect water supplies
Anthropologist and associate professor of history Nick Copeland is part of a team of Virginia Tech researchers using water science to respond to the concerns of rural and Indigenous communities in Guatemala and empowering communities to conduct their own monitoring to protect their waterways. They have taught these communities how to use field testing kits in areas where residents fear that sugar cane, palm oil plantations, and extractive industries are contaminating waterways. The team also is exploring ways that Indigenous environmental justice movements can use water science to address industrial development.
Laying groundwork for pipe replacement
Marc Edwards’ research looks at water contaminants such as lead and deadly microbes including Legionella. His team used citizen science to help expose the 2001-2004 D.C. lead crisis and the 2014-2016 Flint water disaster. His research exposed how antiquated pipes, including those made of lead, are endangering public health, laying the groundwork for billions of dollars in federal funding for pipe replacement. “Our past failures threaten the health and welfare of every American,” Edwards said, adding “if consumers can’t trust the water coming out of the tap as provided by a government water utility, how can we hope to solve more complicated problems?”
Reducing pollution from fracking
A research team led by Wencai Zhang at Virginia Tech received a $1.9 million grant from the Department of Energy to recover high-demand metals, such as lithium and other rare earth elements, from naturally occurring water that comes out of the ground during hydraulic fracking. “High-demand metals and minerals, such as lithium, play an essential role in electric vehicle production and are present in virtually every battery worldwide,” said Zhang. “Our goal is to contribute to the supply chain of these critical materials while also making a positive environmental impact.” The research aims to reduce the environmental consequences associated with water produced by fracking, removing pollutants and making it safer for affected communities.
Underwater robots bring new understandings
Dan Stilwell and his team develop autonomous underwater robots that can operate without human intervention. Recently, they have been deployed to rapidly search for hazards to navigation, search large areas of ocean for sources of methane that bubble up from the seafloor and characterize the flow of microplastics through Virginia’s waterways. Because these robots can make intelligent decisions based on their real-time measurements of their surroundings, they can conduct investigations in the ocean that would be nearly impossible with a human onboard. This technology can help determine how concentrated microplastics have become in the ocean and how that could affect wildlife. The robots could also help to map the ocean floor, contributing to a more complete picture of the Earth’s climate.
Artificial intelligence and water quality forecasts
Computer engineer Anuj Karpatne’s research explores the potential for artificial intelligence to forecast water quality in lakes that supply drinking water. To develop this technology, he recently collaborated on a project intended to provide real-time forecasts of water quality for the Falling Creek Reservoir in Roanoke, Virginia. “This reservoir is a major source of drinking water for Roanoke residents, and we are interested in forecasting its temperature, chlorophyll content, and other water quality variables,” Karpatne said. “We aim to generate better forecasts of water quality in lakes and reservoirs that can directly impact the people who depend on their water.”
Defending water supply cybersecurity
The research conducted by Feras Batarseh and his AI & Cyber for Water & Ag lab — ACWA for short, pronounced “aqua” — highlights a different way of protecting water resources. The team collects data in order to develop artificial intelligence algorithms that can help defend water systems from cyber-attacks and other threats. Batarseh is associated with the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative, Virginia’s central hub for cybersecurity research. He also works with the Center for Advanced Innovation in Agriculture, an entity in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences that focuses on cyberbiosecurity. “The ACWA lab provides a test bed for stakeholders such as water treatment plants and utilities all over the country to come to Virginia Tech and evaluate the security levels at their utilities, and how they can improve,” Batarseh said.
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