DEPLOY: a long term deployment of a water quality sensor monitoring system

Purpose - DEPLOY is a successful technology demonstration project showing how state of the art technology can be implemented to achieve, continuous, real-time monitoring of a river catchment. Design/methodology/approach - The DEPLOY system is a wide area network of monitoring stations delivering data in near real-time. The demonstration sites chosen are based in the River Lee, which flows through Ireland's second largest city, Cork. The sites include monitoring stations in five zones considered typical of significant river systems and demonstrate the versatility of the technology available. Data were collected from stations at pre-programmed intervals and transmitted to the DEPLOY servers either by short range ISM band radio or directly via the GSM GPRS network. The data were then processed and made available in a controlled manner at www.deploy.ie Findings - The project demonstrates the capability of multi-sensor systems to remotely monitor temporal and spatial variations in water quality, through the identification of short-term events. A system like DEPLOY could be used as a decision support tool by regulatory bodies in managing our aquatic environment with the potential to cut overall monitoring costs and provide better coverage representing long-term trends in fluctuations of pollutant concentrations. Originality/value - The demonstration of a truly heterogeneous water quality monitoring networked system was one of the first of its kind in Ireland. Based on the collected data DEPLOY can provide recommendations for water quality monitoring systems from various perspectives, technical, operational and strategic.