What is POSEIDON?

The health of the Great Lakes is increasingly threatened by harmful algal blooms, occurring in response to excess nutrients in the water and a warming climate. Upper Thames River Conservation Authority (UTRCA)’s Water Quality Specialist, Craig Irwin, was invited to a workshop that included the official launch of a new water quality portal called POSEIDON, designed to aid in understanding and mitigating the human impacts on water quality. The web-based portal has been developed by Dr. Nandita Basu and her team at the University of Waterloo to analyze vast amounts of water quality data. The goal of the workshop was to solicit input and user feedback to enhance functionality as well as discussing promotional strategies and target audiences for the portal.

POSEIDON will utilize machine learning models to predict stream nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations and loads as a function of streamflow, and a suite of landscape attributes like temperature, slope, precipitation and nutrient inputs. The model has been calibrated in Ontario using the Provincial Water Quality Monitoring Network dataset which UTRCA contributes to through monitoring on a monthly basis. Staff are looking forward to the public launch of POSEIDON and are finding the portal is very innovative with lots of potential applications in the future.

Contact: Craig Irwin, Water Quality Specialist