Novel Statistical Methods Improving Water Quality Monitoring and Network Design
Environment agencies invest substantial financial and staff resources in monitoring UK river networks to improve water quality at a time of increased financial pressures. Researchers in the Statistics and Data Analytics group applied innovative statistical modelling and developed interactive open access statistical tools to interrogate existing data and assess the ability of current and future monitoring network designs used by the Environment Agency (EA) to provide evidence on water quality trends. This evidence demonstrated UK water policies compliance with European Commission directives and enabled the EA to plan a more efficient and representative network improving water quality monitoring within budget.
Researchers
Publications
- Flow-directed PCA for monitoring networks. Environmetrics, 28 (2), (2017).
- Spatiotemporal statistical modelling of long-term change in river nutrient concentrations in England & Wales, Science of the Total Environment, (2017).
- Assessing ecological responses to environmental change using statistical models. Journal of Applied Ecology, 45 (1), (2008).