Why monitoring is important
Without water, no life can exist, and many essential and non-essential human activities cannot take place without the use of healthy watersheds. These same activities can affect watersheds in small and large ways. Watersheds often cross political and cultural boundaries; while neighbors separated by city, state, or national borders may not live under the same legal and cultural norms, they may be citizens of the same watershed. By this measure, ensuring the health of the watershed (or the lakes, streams, and rivers within it) is a duty to your fellow citizens, as well as to your local, state, or federal regulators. For the same reason, water quality regulations are increasingly focused at the basin level rather than being established through political boundaries. If a stream or river is likely to be impacted by your project, it is critical to have an appropriate river monitoring system in place to ensure that hydrological and water quality impacts to the waterway are minimized and mitigate any impacts if detected.
Stream and River Management
Like the arteries and veins in the body, streams and rivers pump an invaluable lifeline—namely, fresh water—across the landscape. In the United States, management of these vessels, and of all water bodies, focuses on maintaining and expanding existing freshwater supplies to meet growing demand. This demand is driven by a variety of uses, which the USGS broadly categorizes as commercial, household, industrial, irrigation, livestock, mining, utility supply, and thermal power. While not all of these uses can draw water directly from streams or rivers, the water needed for each use will almost certainly pass through flowing waterways at some point.
Monitoring systems may be established in streams and rivers for reasons different from the water uses described above, but your application may fall into one of two broad categories: research or practice. Research applications include systems designed to study one or more aspects of stream and river hydrology or water quality, whether for education or to provide a better understanding of human impacts, animal use, habitat quality, and more. Practical applications include systems designed to monitor your impact on your own projects, or those of your customers. This may entail monitoring turbidity during dredging projects, discharge and flow rates in fish hatcheries, or nutrient loading near agricultural operations, among others.
Common concern
A wide variety of hydrological phenomena occurs in streams and rivers, each as complex as the last and, in many cases, intertwined with each other. Natural resource managers responsible for the maintenance of waterways may need to pay close attention to some or all of these phenomena, and specific monitoring programs may only be designed to observe the specific effects of one of these phenomena. Even if your application calls for monitoring only one parameter or process, understanding how that process affects other parameters and adapting to the overall health of the river will improve your ability to analyze the data and respond appropriately.
Typical River Monitoring System
Many hydrological and water quality parameters can be measured in a stream or river, but the needs of one monitoring program can be very different from another. The number of monitoring stations, their location, and the instrumentation used at each station vary from project to project, but a general solution is based on at least one flowmeter station and associated instrumentation.
To be effective, measurement data should be provided in real time. The easiest and most effective method is to install flow measuring stations on river banks or vertical structures such as piers or bridge supports. Flow meters built around the absorber well can contain other instruments such as multiparameter sondes equipped with sensor arrays, as well as data loggers and telemetry systems. A variety of telemetry options are available, and continuous real-time data is available from any computer. This ensures that projects run smoothly and that any control measures can be immediately implemented if parameter limits are exceeded.
Water quality monitoring system-water monitor station
The water monitor station is an industry intelligent terminal directly applied to the river/lake long system, water ecological environment monitoring, aquaculture and other fields. The water quality monitoring system supports access to dozens of monitoring sensors such as five conventional parameters (dissolved oxygen, turbidity, conductivity, pH, water temperature), ammonia nitrogen, redox potential, COD, chlorophyll, and input liquid level; equipped with professional-grade sensor protection The kit can prevent microorganisms and surface attachments, monitor more accurately, and have a longer life; deep low-power processing, single-sided high-power photovoltaic panel, large-capacity lithium battery, equipment protection grade IP67, sensor part is IP68.