Lancaster University's Centre for Sustainable Water Management (CSWM) has acquired a mobile laboratory designed and constructed by Partech Instruments
The mobile laboratory will play an important role in research into understanding how nutrients move between ground and surface waters.
The Partech mobile laboratory contains two four-channel nutrient analysers and a water quality monitor.
These instruments enable water quality monitoring, ie, turbidity, pH, redox, DO, and conductivity to be measured every ten minutes.
If the turbidity level increases the total phosphorus facility is turned on automatically to measure in Fast Total Phosphorus ten minute cycles.
Normally it measures total phosphorus every hour and produces a nutrient suite comprising ammonia nitrate, nitrate, orthophosphate, on streams 1, 2 or 3 every hour.
The laboratory is powered by solar and wind power generators and results are transmitted by telemetry.
Headed by co-directors Louise Heathwaite and Phil Haygarth, the CSWM seeks to deliver cross-disciplinary science in water-related research areas.
Research activities at the centre focus on developing scientific tools and techniques to enable the uncertainties associated with land and water use problems to be addressed in the development of sustainable water management strategies.
"The mobile laboratory supplied by Partech Instruments will play an important role in research into understanding how nutrients move between ground and surface (river) waters," comments Paddy Keenan at the CSWM.
"To put the significance of this research into context, groundwater-fed rivers, such as the one the mobile laboratory will be monitoring, are very important because of the special ecosystems that they support, providing habitats for some of the UK's most notable, yet threatened aquatic species, including the white-clawed crayfish, river and brook lamprey, Atlantic salmon, otter, bullhead and water crowfoot (Ranunculus spp).
"Many of the rivers in the UK are supplied mainly from groundwater sources, especially during the summer months when rainfall is characteristically low.
"There is a need to understand how rivers like this will respond to changes in climate.
"The centre's research will help us to learn more about the processes that operate in something called the hyporheic zone where groundwater and surface water mix.
"This zone could be very important for the ecological health of the river and ultimately the fish populations that the river supports.
"The river which the laboratory will be monitoring is a really good example of groundwater flow into the river, which is especially important in the summer months when rainfall is lower and there is not much surface water entering the river as runoff from the river catchment.
"The unique design of the mobile laboratory will enable us to study what happens in the hyporheic zone by sampling nutrient concentrations in both surface and ground waters at high temporal resolution."
