Reducing wastewater nitrogen loading by >90% with carbon-amended septic systems: A field demonstration in Barnstable (Cape Cod), Massachusetts.

Onsite wastewater treatment systems (OWTS) are a major source of excess nutrients and co-pollutants in watersheds across the United States. In Barnstable County (Cape Cod), Massachusetts, effluent from septic systems and cesspools contributes approximately 80% of the controllable reactive nitrogen (N) load to numerous impaired estuaries and degrades water quality in the region's sole source aquifer, streams and ponds. In unsewered areas, wastewater N loads could be reduced substantially by Innovative/Alternative (I/A) septic systems designed for enhanced removal.

Beyond Old Pipes and Ailing Budgets: Systems Thinking on Twenty-First Century Water Infrastructure in Chicago.

Cities are increasingly burdened by aging water infrastructure. Deferred maintenance and upgrades are compounded by emerging concerns over contaminants, extreme weather events, demographic shifts, equity, and affordability of water services. These and other evolving twenty-first century conditions prompt changes to urban water infrastructure and related systems that have wide ranging outcomes.

An R Package for Open, Reproducible Analysis of Urban Water Systems, With Application to Chicago.

Urban water systems consist of natural and engineered flows of water interacting in complex ways. System complexity can be understood via mass conservative models that account for the interrelationships among all major flows and storages. We have developed a generic urban water system model in the R package .

Arsenic in the multi-aquifer system of the Mekong Delta, Vietnam: analysis of large-scale spatial trends and controlling factors.

Groundwater exploitation is rising in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, potentially exacerbating arsenic contamination from natural sources. We investigate trends and controls on contamination patterns throughout the Delta's multi-aquifer system as observed in a spatially exhaustive data set of arsenic measured in >40,000 wells, 10.5% of which exceed the WHO drinking water standard for arsenic (10 μg/L).

Release of arsenic to deep groundwater in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, linked to pumping-induced land subsidence.

Deep aquifers in South and Southeast Asia are increasingly exploited as presumed sources of pathogen- and arsenic-free water, although little is known of the processes that may compromise their long-term viability. We analyze a large area (>1,000 km(2)) of the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, in which arsenic is found pervasively in deep, Pliocene-Miocene-age aquifers, where nearly 900 wells at depths of 200-500 m are contaminated. There, intensive groundwater extraction is causing land subsidence of up to 3 cm/y as measured using satellite-based radar images from 2007 to 2010 and consistent with transient 3D aquifer simulations showing similar subsidence rates and total subsidence of up to 27 cm since 1988.