RISMEAU dataset: Pharmaceuticals and biocides concentrations in urban and agricultural sludge, amended soil and leachate and their environmental impacts.

The RISMEAU project ( - Risks related to residues of pharmaceuticals and biocides, and antimicrobial resistance of human and veterinary origin on the water resources of the 2083 km Arve catchment located in the French Alps) was implanted from 2018 to 2024 on the SIPIBEL observatory. It was devoted to the evaluation of (i) transfers of and processes related to pharmaceutical residues and biocides from both urban sludge and manure spread on fields as fertilisers, and (ii) the environmental impacts of land spreading, in particular the ecotoxicological risks and antimicrobial resistance dissemination. The methodology was based on the physico-chemical, ecotoxicological and antimicrobial resistance (AMR - assessed by molecular biology) characterisation of leachate and soil matrices samples, and focused on organic waste products application at locally representative agronomic rates.

End-user perspective of low-cost sensors for urban stormwater monitoring: a review.

The large-scale deployment of low-cost monitoring systems has the potential to revolutionize the field of urban hydrology monitoring, bringing improved urban management, and a better living environment. Even though low-cost sensors emerged a few decades ago, versatile and cheap electronics like Arduino could give stormwater researchers a new opportunity to build their own monitoring systems to support their work. To find out sensors which are ready for low-cost stormwater monitoring systems, for the first time, we review the performance assessments of low-cost sensors for monitoring air humidity, wind speed, solar radiation, rainfall, water level, water flow, soil moisture, water pH, conductivity, turbidity, nitrogen, and phosphorus in a unified metrological framework considering numerous parameters.

Practice makes the model: A critical review of stormwater green infrastructure modelling practice.

Green infrastructures (GIs) have in recent decades emerged as sustainable technologies for urban stormwater management, and numerous studies have been conducted to develop and improve hydrological models for GIs. This review aims to assess current practice in GI hydrological modelling, encompassing the selection of model structure, equations, model parametrization and testing, uncertainty analysis, sensitivity analysis, the selection of objective functions for model calibration, and the interpretation of modelling results. During a quantitative and qualitative analysis, based on a paper analysis methodology applied across a sample of 270 published studies, we found that the authors of GI modelling studies generally fail to justify their modelling choices and their alignments between modelling objectives and methods.

Classifying pollutant flush signals in stormwater using functional data analysis on TSS MV curves.

Pollution levels in stormwater vary significantly during rain events, with pollutant flushes carrying a major fraction of an event pollutant load in a short period. Understanding these flushes is thus essential for stormwater management. However, current studies mainly focus on describing the first flush or are limited by predetermined flush categories.

SIPIBEL observatory: Data on usual pollutants (solids, organic matter, nutrients, ions) and micropollutants (pharmaceuticals, surfactants, metals), biological and ecotoxicity indicators in hospital and urban wastewater, in treated effluent and sludge from wastewater treatment plant, and in surface and groundwater.

The Bellecombe pilot site - SIPIBEL - was created in 2010 in order to study the characterisation, treatability and impacts of hospital effluents in an urban wastewater treatment plant. This pilot site is composed of: i) the Alpes Léman hospital (CHAL), opened in February 2012, ii) the Bellecombe wastewater treatment plant, with two separate treatment lines allowing to fully separate the hospital wastewater and the urban wastewater, and iii) the Arve River as the receiving water body and a tributary of the Rhône River and the Geneva aquifer. The database includes in total 48 439 values measured on 961 samples (raw and treated hospital and urban wastewater, activated sludge in aeration tanks, dried sludge after dewatering, river and groundwater, and a few additional campaigns in aerobic and anaerobic sewers) with 44 455 physico-chemistry values (including 15 pharmaceuticals and 14 related transformation products, biocides compounds, metals, organic micropollutants), 2 193 bioassay values (ecotoxicity), 1 679 microbiology values (including microorganisms and antibioresistance indicators) and 112 hydrobiology values.

Modelling daily and hourly loads of pharmaceuticals in urban wastewater.

Pharmaceuticals are known contaminants of the environment. Assessing and managing the risk associated to this contamination has become an important field of study in environmental sciences. Accurately sampling and measuring pharmaceuticals concentrations in wastewater or in the environment is still costly and difficult.

Performance and uncertainties of TSS stormwater sampling strategies from online time series.

The event mean concentrations (EMCs) that would have been obtained by four different stormwater sampling strategies are simulated by using total suspended solids (TSS) and flowrate time series (about one minute time-step and one year of data). These EMCs are compared to the reference EMCs calculated by considering the complete time series. The sampling strategies are assessed with datasets from four catchments: (i) Berlin, Germany, combined sewer overflow (CSO); (ii) Graz, Austria, CSO; (iii) Chassieu, France, separate sewer system; and (iv) Ecully, France, CSO.

Evaluation of two statistical approaches for estimating pollutant loads at adjacent combined sewer overflow structures.

Quantifying pollutant loads from combined sewer overflows (CSOs) is necessary for assessing impacts of urban drainage on receiving water bodies. Based on data obtained at three adjacent CSO structures in the Louis Fargue catchment in Bordeaux, France, this study implements multiple linear regression (MLR) and random forest regression (RFR) approaches to develop statistical models for estimating emitted loads of total suspended solids (TSS). Comparison between hierarchical clustering selection and random selection of CSO events for model calibration is included in model development.

Revisiting conceptual stormwater quality models by reconstructing virtual state variables.

This work proposes a Bayesian non-informative reconstruction of virtual state variables in the representation of stormwater total suspended solids pollutographs by the traditional wash-off models, based on 255 rainfall events measured in a 185 ha French urban catchment. Results from event-based analyses revealed the missing representation of an essential process in the traditional rating curve (RC) model (simplest wash-off model) for 56% of the rainfall events. The unsatisfactory performances of the RC model are found to be not necessarily linked to antecedent dry weather conditions, as assumed by a great number of accumulation/wash-off models.

Assessment of sampling strategies for estimation of site mean concentrations of stormwater pollutants.

The estimation of stormwater pollutant concentrations is a primary requirement of integrated urban water management. In order to determine effective sampling strategies for estimating pollutant concentrations, data from extensive field measurements at seven different catchments was used. At all sites, 1-min resolution continuous flow measurements, as well as flow-weighted samples, were taken and analysed for total suspend solids (TSS), total nitrogen (TN) and Escherichia coli (E.

The SIPIBEL project: treatment of hospital and urban wastewater in a conventional urban wastewater treatment plant.

Hospital wastewater (HWW) receives increasing attention because of its specific composition and higher concentrations of some micropollutants. Better knowledge of HWW is needed in order to improve management strategies and to ensure the preservation of wastewater treatment efficiency and freshwater ecosystems. This context pushed forward the development of a pilot study site named Site Pilote de Bellecombe (SIPIBEL), which collects and treats HWW separately from urban wastewater, applying the same conventional treatment process.

Calibration of UV/Vis spectrophotometers: A review and comparison of different methods to estimate TSS and total and dissolved COD concentrations in sewers, WWTPs and rivers.

UV/Vis spectrophotometers have been used for one decade to monitor water quality in various locations: sewers, rivers, wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), tap water networks, etc. Resulting equivalent concentrations of interest can be estimated by three ways: i) by manufacturer global calibration; ii) by local calibration based on the provided global calibration and grab sampling; iii) by advanced calibration looking for relations between UV/Vis spectra and corresponding concentrations from grab sampling. However, no study has compared the applied methods so far.

Using a Bayesian approach to improve and calibrate a dynamic model of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons degradation in an industrial contaminated soil.

A novel kinetics model that describes the dynamics of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in contaminated soils is presented. The model includes two typical biodegradation pathways: the co-metabolic pathway using pseudo first order kinetics and the specific biodegradation pathway modeled using Monod kinetics. The sorption of PAHs to the solid soil occurs through bi-phasic fist order kinetics, and two types of non-extractible bounded residues are considered: the biogenic and the physically sequestrated into soil matrix.

Simplified hydraulic model of French vertical-flow constructed wetlands.

Designing vertical-flow constructed wetlands (VFCWs) to treat both rain events and dry weather flow is a complex task due to the stochastic nature of rain events. Dynamic models can help to improve design, but they usually prove difficult to handle for designers. This study focuses on the development of a simplified hydraulic model of French VFCWs using an empirical infiltration coefficient--infiltration capacity parameter (ICP).

Computational fluid dynamics modelling of flow and particulate contaminants sedimentation in an urban stormwater detention and settling basin.

Sedimentation is a common but complex phenomenon in the urban drainage system. The settling mechanisms involved in detention basins are still not well understood. The lack of knowledge on sediment transport and settling processes in actual detention basins is still an obstacle to the optimization of the design and the management of the stormwater detention basins.

Accuracy of different sensors for the estimation of pollutant concentrations (total suspended solids, total and dissolved chemical oxygen demand) in wastewater and stormwater.

Many field investigations have used continuous sensors (turbidimeters and/or ultraviolet (UV)-visible spectrophotometers) to estimate with a short time step pollutant concentrations in sewer systems. Few, if any, publications compare the performance of various sensors for the same set of samples. Different surrogate sensors (turbidity sensors, UV-visible spectrophotometer, pH meter, conductivity meter and microwave sensor) were tested to link concentrations of total suspended solids (TSS), total and dissolved chemical oxygen demand (COD), and sensors' outputs.

Input variable selection and calibration data selection for storm water quality regression models.

Storm water quality models are useful tools in storm water management. Interest has been growing in analyzing existing data for developing models for urban storm water quality evaluations. It is important to select appropriate model inputs when many candidate explanatory variables are available.

A priori assessment of ecotoxicological risks linked to building a hospital.

Hospital wastewaters contain a large number of chemical pollutants such as disinfectants, detergents, and drug residues. A part of these pollutants is not eliminated by traditional urban waste water treatment plants, leading to a major risk for the aquatic ecosystems receiving these effluents. After having formulated a specific methodology in order to assessment ecotoxicological risk for such a situation, we applied it to the project to build a new hospital shared by several towns in the French Alps.

Optimisation of pressurised liquid extraction for the ultra-trace quantification of 20 priority substances from the European Water Framework Directive in atmospheric particles by GC-MS and LC-FLD-MS/MS.

Atmospheric deposition plays an important role in environmental pollution and human health. However, very few information is available on the presence, in atmospheric particles, of organic priority substances in contrast to inorganic fraction. A method for the extraction and quantification of 20 priority organic substances listed in the European Water Framework Directive in atmospheric particles was developed.

Stormwater pollutant loads modelling: epistemological aspects and case studies on the influence of field data sets on calibration and verification.

In urban drainage, stormwater quality models have been used by researchers and practitioners for more than 15 years. Most of them were initially developed for research purposes, and have been later on implemented in commercial software packages devoted to operational needs. This paper presents some epistemological problems and difficulties with practical consequences in the application of stormwater quality models, such as simplified representation of reality, scaling-up, over-parameterisation, transition from calibration to verification and prediction, etc.