River Basin Water Quality Monitoring

Aims and Objectives

This YESI Fellows project aims to explore new connections between the Institute for Safe Autonomy, the Department of Environment and Geography, the Department of Biology and several research units at Mahidol University (Thailand) for the co-design of research on river basin water quality monitoring. This will support the Worldwide Universities Network project “participatory water quality monitoring for sustainable development” that is a collaboration between York, Mahidol and Maastricht universities. We will explore ways to link up different community-based data on water pollution with real-time measured data for the river basin Mae Khlong in Thailand. For instance, this may involve finding out how and where to collect the data from the communities and in real time, how to manage the data and make it accessible to the communities and governmental agencies. 

We will explore ways for the use of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in some of the tasks around the data collection and/or processing. This work will help us identify important spatial and knowledge gaps in real-time measurement delivery. We will also engage (through interviews) with different stakeholders (e.g. families, academics, industrial companies, farmers, hotels, river cruise companies, local authorities etc.) involved in or affected by the pollution of the river. 

We will organise a set of workshops in Thailand with governmental agencies and the communities to increase the awareness of the sources of pollution and involve the communities for future work (citizen science approach). We will engage with these stakeholders to co-develop our approaches and discuss our findings. 

We will also explore linkage and knowledge transfer between different research projects on water quality monitoring (e.g. Israel/Palestine, Vanuatu, etc.), through webinars to discuss water quality measurements techniques and challenges, present this project’s results with the wider research community and discuss the next steps for collaboration.