EnviLife – Sustainable environmental monitoring and prediction of pollutants spread

Project goal: EnviLife project enables a multidisciplinary approach to building a reliable data processing-based tool for predicting contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) spread over arable soil and surface water used for irrigation.

About the project: The key role of BioSense in EnviLife project will be improvements to existing portable mass spectrometers with the development of a miniature membrane sample inlet and pre-concentrator for fast separation of toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in water. Another aspect will be providing mapping of contaminants spread in the soil, which will provide a supplementary layer for the selection of sampling locations. The dataset with relevant environmental factors will be created from open-source databases to generate the final map of contaminants spread in the soil over the study area, various machine learning algorithms will be tried out and evaluated using cross-validation. The results will be integrated into a final system in the form of a map that will include pollutants spread across all pilot locations.

BioSense role on the project: BioSense is the coordinator of the EnviLife project and scientific lead in development of a reliable prediction tool to identify pollution spread over water and arable soil near the Hydro-system Danube-Tisza-Danube (DTD). It combines information technologies and sophisticated analytical methods for in-field identification of toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in irrigation water. The data gathered during the project will be processed using advanced data analytics methods, together with satellite imaging and various open databases about weather conditions and terrain features.