Section Chair

Prof. Maurizio Barbieri (Department of Earth Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome, ITALY)

Significant quantities of some pollutants have been introduced in the environment by human activities (e.g. energy production, communications, agriculture, textiles, medicine, cosmetics, and personal care products). An understanding of these processes is an essential tool in many environmental investigations. This session will provide a forum for presenting research related to aqueous geochemical principles, as well as examples of real-world applications. Topics will include: fundamentals of dissolved ions and their interactions; common techniques of water sample collection and analysis; environmental tracers; groundwater treatment and remediation; regulatory aspects; geochemical modelling and applications of isotopic and geochemical tracers to the industrial emissions and effluents.  Participants are welcome to present novel research in identifying the emerging contaminants (from geogenic or anthropogenic sources) in the complex environmental matrix, especially geochemical analysis in relation to their bioavailability and toxicity. 

Keywords: environmental geochemistry; geogenic; geochemical modelling; environmental contaminants; tracers; organic and inorganic contaminants.

Section Chair

Prof. Dr. Maria Filomena Camões

Water, H₂O, the most abundant substance on Earth’s surface and the only one to be naturally present in all three physical states, solid, liquid and gas, moves continuously through its hydrological cycle, dissolving, to smaller or bigger extent, most substances it contacts with. Water is decisive in terms of climate regulator, it is vital to known forms of life and plays an important role in the world economy. Water takes part in chemical reactions as a solvent and as a reactant.

What is often called “water” is in fact some aqueous mixture, solution or suspension. This makes it difficult to find water with a degree of purity adequate to most uses. There is increasing competition for water from industry and urbanization, its quality being regulated by national and international legislation. The variety and concentration of chemical species in the aquatic systems can be quite diversified, presenting a challenge in terms of both purification and quality control.

This section aims at promoting dissemination and discussion of relevant issues of the scope of Analytical Chemistry, ranging from development and applications of methods, instruments, and strategies to obtain information on the composition and nature of water in space and time and its fitness-for-the-purpose.

Keywords: water types and uses; aqueous solutions; analytical strategies; quality parameters; method validation; measurement results, uncertainty and traceability. 

Section Chair

Prof. Dr. Enedir Ghisi (Laboratory of Energy Efficiency in Buildings, Department of Civil Engineering, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Campus Universitario, Trindade, Florianópolis - SC, 88040-900, Brazil)

As the population of many countries has increased rapidly, water availability and water supply have become a matter of increasing concern all over the world. According to United Nations, the world population is currently growing at 77 million people per year, which means that by keeping this growth rate there will be about 9 billion people in the world in 2050. This represents a 50% increase on the world population. Water resources are limited, therefore there will be water availability problems in many countries and it will be a challenge for governments to ensure an adequate potable water supply to all the population. In order to ease water availability problems and decrease potable water demand, rainwater harvesting has been suggested by many researchers. It has been reported that rainwater promotes potable water savings in many types of buildings all over the world. Therefore, this section welcomes papers on all subjects related to rainwater harvesting in buildings.

Keywords: Potable water; rainwater harvesting; economic and health issues; modeling and simulation

Section Chair

Prof. Dr. Sunny Jiang (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-2175, USA)

Water is essential to support life system on earth but it is also the major cause of human morbidity and mortality in the world due to the presence of disease causing pathogens in water supply. The important link between human diseases and microbial contamination of water has been recognized since the first pandemic of chorea. However, the struggle for detecting, removing pathogens from water or preventing them from entering the water system is far from over. Pathogen monitoring technologies have improved from cultivation, isolation and identification based approaches to culture-independent molecular biological and near real time methods. Multi-barrier water treatment technologies have been implemented to recycle human sewage to drinking water. However, there are important gaps and significant challenges remain. This section will focus on advances in pathogen monitoring, treatment technologies, and innovative sanitary collection and treatment systems for separating pathogens from water resource. Another important area of water safety is at understanding the risk of human illness from exposure to pathogens and setting the right regulation and policy based on the pathogen or surrogate level.

Keywords: bacteria; viruses; protozoa; fecal indicator; sanitation; risk assessment; public health policy

Section Chair

Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Püttmann
Committee member of the 2^st International Electronic Conference on Water Sciences
Professor in Environmental Analytical Chemistry, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Institute of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, Department of Environmental Analytical Chemistry, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

After more than 30 years of continuous progressing research on the identification and evaluation of anthropogenic contaminant in the aquatic environment we should expect that most problems related to their possible influence on water quality should have been solved in the meantime. However, proceeding advances in analytical chemistry allow the detection of “new” chemicals that recently reach the water cycle but also of “old” chemicals that previously absconded from detection due to the absence of appropriate analytical tools. The recently intensified application of non-target analysis was helpful for the identification of abundant emerging pollutants. Currently, more than 700 emerging pollutants, metabolites and transformation products are listed as known constituents in the European aquatic environment (www.norman-network.net). Most of these compounds are currently not subject of water quality legislation partly due to a lack of knowledge regarding the contaminant sources and their pathways into the aquatic environment. The risk of drinking water contamination increases when the attenuation of emerging contaminants in the aquatic environment is low due to restricted biodegradation and, in addition, treatment technologies applied to produce drinking water from groundwater and river bank filtrate are ineffective. This combination of disadvantages has recently been identified in case of 1,4-dioxane which is sometime detectable in drinking water obtained from river bank filtrate at concentrations exceeding 1 µg/L.

Contributions dealing with the analysis of emerging contaminants, their behaviour and distribution in the aquatic environment and the risk assessment regarding ecotoxicological effects and drinking water quality are welcomed in this section.

Keywords: emerging contaminants; water cycle; organic pollutants; source identification; transformation products

Section Chair

Prof. Dr. Kevin B. Strychar

Climate change is an inescapable fact established by NOAA data demonstrating progressive increases in warming over the past 150 years.  Significant increases in warming of our atmosphere coupled with our oceans having absorbed an extraordinary amount of heat (expressed as Joules of heat) suggest even if we could stop the warming trend today, the oceans would not begin to cool until 2075.  As such, it is hypothesized that latitudinal borders will be pushed northward and southward toward the poles, creating excessively warm hyper-tropical zones. From pathogens to invasive species, novel, not-endemic species and pathogens will be observed more frequently compromising the health and survivorship of endemic organisms.  

 Keywords: Climate change; oceanography; pathogens; endemic species; hyper-tropical zones; invasive species

Section Chair

Prof. Dr. Richard C. Smardon  (Department of Environmental Studies, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, State University of New York, Syracuse, NYU 13210, USA)

Wetlands and their watersheds, as aquatic systems, provide valuable ecosystem services such as fish and wildlife habitat, nutrient cycling and carbon storage. From a more anthropocentric view these ecosystem services may include food, water supply, waste assimilation as well as aesthetic, recreation and educational opportunities. But these same aquatic systems are heavily stressed by human induced water pollution, land use encroachment and reduced watershed flows due to consumptive water usage in both developed and developing countries. So high quality interdisciplinary aquatic science is needed to address both 1) the nature of such ecosystem services and functions, 2) the stresses on these aquatic systems, and 3) appropriate management strategies to reduce or eliminate such stresses. Climate change is also an increasing dominating factor inducing gradual long-term shifts impacting the health of these aquatic systems – so again we need to understand such shifts and their effects.

Keywords: Wetlands; Watersheds; Water Pollution; Management Strategies; Climate Change

In this section, posters can be presented without an accompanying proceedings paper. Posters will be available online on this website during and after the e-conference. However, will not be added to the proceedings of the conference.