Public Funding for Environmental Monitoring Solutions Limited

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Awaiting Public Project Summary

This project will explore the opportunities and challenges associated with the wider deployment of a 'proven' prototype hand pump monitor called MANTIS. The study will seek to further develop and deploy the MANTIS system and will consider the technological, societal, and market issues associated with its application to rural India. It is anticipated that this exercise will help cultivate more appropriate maintenance strategies for water points by integrating and responding to qualitative (human-centred) and quantitative (technical) insights into daily practices related to local water consumption. The anticipated improvements will relate to reduced waiting times for repairs to broken or poorly performing hand pumps. Prompt repairs are essential because when hand pumps malfunction, many local communities will resort to using less protected water-sources, increasing their exposure to a wide range of water-related diseases. Broken hand water pumps impose obvious hardships upon the rural communities that are reliant on them, and therefore have significant implications for the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 target of universal access to safe drinking water. This project will facilitate cross-learning between industrial, academic, and third sector stakeholders. In turn, this will be used to enhance both public and policy understanding of hand water pump maintenance strategies.

Soft fruit is an exciting product area with excellent growth potential. Although UK soft production is growing by ca. 8%/year, **demand for** berries by UK consumers still exceeds supply. Continued growth is needed to displace often inferior imports, but this must be achieved on a sustainable basis through efficient utilisation of valuable resources (primarily water and inorganic fertilisers) and minimal environmental impact. Soft fruit growers know that a sub-optimal supply of macro- and micro-nutrients will limit marketable yields and berry quality, but most guidelines on fertiliser inputs are hopelessly outdated. These formulations are often adjusted based on anecdotal observations by growers and agronomists, but there is little scientific basis to these amendments and many unneeded macro- and micro-nutrients accumulate in the substrate. Growers then apply irrigation flushing events to remove these harmful so-called "ballast ions" which wastes water, can result in lowered berry firmness, flavour and shelf-life, and poses a risk to local groundwater quality. Excessive N inputs often result in elevated emissions of N2O as a result of denitrification, and N2O emissions account for ca.44% (global warming potential \[GWP\] basis) of the total agriculture-related GHG emissions. CO2 has a GWP value of 1 while N2O has a value of 298, making the latter a more potent GHG. Reducing N inputs in agriculture and horticulture by more closely matching demand with supply should help to reduce N2O emissions, but this is a risky strategy if guidelines and monitoring sensors are not available. Our nutrient demand modelling work in IUK 102124 showed that N input to substrate-grown raspberry could be reduced by 32% without affecting marketable yields and berry quality, and overall water and fertiliser demand was lowered by 20% due to a reduction in plant biomass (less luxuriant growth). In a follow-up project IUK 102640, we have developed a prototype AI-based nitrogen / phosphorous / potassium (NPK) real-time sensor that growers can use to determine NPK availabilities in coir to inform their fertigation decision making, and this will be tested under commercial conditions in 2020\. Here, we propose to combine new variety-specific N demand models with a prototype AI-based sensor that estimates NPK coir availabilities in real time, and embed the outputs into the NetBeat(tm) platform. The SmartNutrigation system will maintain coir NPK availabilities within a narrow optimum range during each developmental stage using outputs from nutrient demand models and real-time feedback from AI-based NPK sensors thereby maximising sustainability.

Awaiting Public Project Summary

There is increasing consumer and retailer demand for high-quality UK-grown strawberries, and this will increase further post-BREXIT as retailers favour British produce. Currently, c. 30% (Defra) of strawberries consumed in the UK are imported, and so there is a great opportunity to displace these, often inferior, imports during the home-grown season and boost the UK economy. However, achieving consistently high yields and quality across variable and challenging growing seasons is difficult, and new growing innovations are needed if UK fruit production is to be optimised to meet market demand, and imports reduced. There is much variability in plant yield and berry quality over a typical covered table-top production system, but the reasons for this are not fully understood and the magnitude of the effect has not been satisfactorily quantified, and so it cannot be managed or predicted. This variability confounds growers' best efforts to forecast yields to inform marketing strategies, and inaccurate forecasts lead to under-supply or to surpluses, necessitating purchases from outside the UK or fruit destruction, both of which are very costly. We will develop new soft fruit growing strategies from an improved understanding of how to optimise individual plant performance across the growing area. We will refine recently-developed fruit harvest and ripening models by incorporating high resolution, satellite-derived weather inputs, and data feeds will be used to inform growers' polytunnel venting strategies to better control growing conditions. Variable ripening rates and yields will be captured using a new app, and algorithms will be developed and embedded in a cloud-based BerryPredictor tool that will enable growers to forecast yields with much greater accuracy and precision than currently possible, across the entire cropping area. BerryPredictor will also provide POs and UK growers with access to real-time accurate yield prediction profiles for the first time. The majority of the R&D work will be carried out at the NIAB Water Efficient Technologies (WET) Centre, an industry-funded soft fruit precision growing demonstration and KE centre, the remit of which is to showcase the latest innovations in soft fruit growing, and promote the commercialisation of project outputs from our IUK and industry-funded projects. BGG commercial growers will provide weather data to inform the models, and yield data to ground-truth BerryPredictor. Project outputs will benefit UK growers (yield, premium price, import substitution), POs (better product with enhanced reputation, reliability and improved marketability), supermarkets and consumers (flavoursome, phytonutritious UK-grown fruit) and wider society (sustainable intensification).

"IRONMAN is a new waste water treatment control technology based on artificial intelligence. It is used to control the addition of iron additives to remove phosphate before water is returned to rivers. It will be much cheaper and much easier to deploy that existing technologies. It will be particularly applicable on smaller waste water treatment sites, where more expensive conventional control isn't viable. Current treatment control is often wasteful. The worst possible conditions are assumed and enough additive is used to cope with these conditions even if this isn't required. IRONMAN will save around 40% of additives. On a site serving 50,000 people, the cost of IRONMAN would be paid for in less than 6 months by the reduced cost of additives alone. The over-addition of chemicals is also wasteful in terms of the energy used to produce the chemicals and the overall carbon-footprint of the treatment process. In England and Wales, the progress on reducing river pollution has stalled in recent years. This is heavily influenced by the level of nutrients, such as phosphate, in rivers; waste water treatment works are a major source. In response to this, the EA is driving permit levels down and treatment processes are reaching their limits, so-much-so that the level of iron additives is leading to very high iron levels in effluent. IRONMAN is also a response to this problem. IRONMAN is autonomous, based on a type of artificial intelligence called fuzzy logic, which mimics human reasoning. Autonomous infrastructure can take away the need for expensive and, in the case of this particular application, often unreliable or ineffective human intervention. For fairly narrow tasks, AIs such as fuzzy logic can be very effectively specialised. They can provide pronounced improvements on current processes and systems. IRONMAN will be an adaptation of another technology which is successfully used for autonomous urban flood risk reduction. The technology has outstanding potential for repurposing in other applications ripe for autonomous systems. This project will be a first venture into this repurposing and will form a bridge-head into a world of similar autonomous systems."

UK raspberry production was worth £109M in 2014, but a further 11KT of berries, worth £59M, are imported each year. A 20% increase in the 14KT of fruit produced p.a. in the UK could be expected to reduce imports by 2.8KT, and raise the value of the UK industry by £15.7M p.a.. However, improved on- farm management of water and fertiliser inputs is needed to optimise productivity; currently, excessive fertigation to substrate-grown raspberry result in vigorous cane growth which makes crop management difficult and harvesting costly. Nutrient leaching also poses a risk to groundwater quality. We will use novel affinity sensors combined with fuzzy logic to automatically adjust nutrient inputs to match plant demand in real time, reduce fertiliser losses to the environment and improve berry quality. Stress preconditioning and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) will be used to raise marketable yields, improve resource use and acquisition, and increase crop resilience to stresses.

Hand operated community water pumps in rural areas of the Global South fail and can remain out of service for significant periods of time causing hardship for local communities. This represents a wasted investment in improved water supply by the organisations funding the systems. Pump operability is monitored sporadically, if at all, dependent on the type of business model employed by owners. Centralised, low cost, reliable visibility of pump operability for pump owners will enable prioritised and efficient maintenance schedules and will result in more reliable water supply. MANTIS (Monitoring & ANalytics To Improve Service) is a low-cost, low-power, easy-to-install remote monitoring unit that records the use of hand pumps. It processes and relays operational information to an on-line platform. The system uses state of the art visualisation and gives early indication of failure and the nature of failure. The simplicity of MANTIS keeps operating costs and energy use to a minimum. Engagement with the potential users will enhance product development and define the route to market for this UK invention.

To develop low cost data loggers for monitoring water projects in developing regions, to ensure their continued success in providing clean drinking water.

We propose to deliver a mutliplex mass MEMS based sensor (MultiMEMS) for the simultaneous detection of phosphate and nitrate in agricultural environments. MultiMEMS delivers a step-change capability to the agri-food supply chain to maximise crop production, profitability and minimise the negative impacts of modern crop production methods. By reducing the levels of excess fertilisers and pesticides, MultiMEMS not only enables crop farmers to optimise expenditure of chemicals to improve yield, but it simultaneously ensures the minimisation of environmental impact by reducing leaching of nitrates and phosphates into water courses and aquifers. The leaching of agriculture derived compounds into aquatic environments is harmful, not only to fresh water supplies and potable water, but also to aquatic health. MultiMEMS is a versatile and readily deployable continuous monitoring package that enables the minimal use of fertilisers and crop protection whilst enhancing water and soil management techniques by recording and transmitting real-time pollution values reducing the operational expenditure of nutrients required per crop cycle.

‘Sewerage network failure’ caused by blockages is known as a Flooding Other Causes (FOC) as it is triggered by something other than hydraulic overload of the sewerage system in the normal state. Property damage and clean-up can be £10k per property; in 2012 a Water Sewerage Company (WSC) which cannot be disclosed due to current negotiations with OFWAT had 17,000 escapes at a cost of £17M. OFWAT have introduced the Service Incentive Mechanism (SIM) which through key indictors encourages WSCs to improve their asset and customer performance. SIM affects the prices WSCs are allowed to charge customers (their price limit); poor performers are penalised £10s millions and the best rewarded with higher price limits. No current viable system exists to alarm when an FOC event occurs, except from the customer. This is partly because of the geographical scale of the problem and the also the cost to own/operate legacy monitoring systems (£3k procure, £500/year operate). With an aging sewerage infrastructure the direction of travel for WSCs is innovation with many identifying sewer monitoring as a key way forward. Environmental Monitoring Solutions (EMS) wishes to conduct a ‘Development of Prototype’ project to engineer a remote sensor system capable of operating in a passive mode with little maintenance and no cleaning. The proposed system will encompass GPRS communications techniques to transfer alarms to Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based central processing modules and FOC incidence database. This system will allow simple threshold data to visibly show representation of the network state, prompting proactive management by the operator and reacting to potential and developing blockages before they impact on their customers. These meters do not exist, need to be low cost; they cannot be anything other than simple. The business proposition to develop and supply the proposed technology has been validated through discussion with five WSCs.