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Environmental Forensic Tools for Water Resources

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Water Safety, Security and Sustainability

Abstract

Environmental forensics consists of a set of defensible scientific methods to address histories and sources of contamination in environment and involves the reconstruction of past environmental events, such as the timing, types and amounts, and sources of chemical releases to the environment. Interrogations necessitating environmental forensic applications usually relate to understanding of the extent, duration, and responsibility for environmental contamination sites in a regulatory and/or legal context. These approaches are also integral to due diligence of environmental aspects related to mergers, acquisitions and remediation cost recovery. Techniques such as chemical fingerprinting, chemical fate and transport modeling, hydrogeological investigation, and reconstructing operational histories, among others are at the heart of many investigations. These and newer techniques, such as multivariate receptor statistical modeling, continue to evolve and have become more sophisticated over time, as have the types of problems to which they are applied. Scenarios in which environmental forensics have been applied have ranged from remote Arctic environments to urban sediments. In both extreme scenarios, the chemical condition of the environment—i.e., the background or baseline—is a central part of any investigation. It is upon this background that additional contamination from one or several responsible methods may be juxtaposed. The types of problems to which environmental forensic techniques are commonly applied include: identifying and quantifying contributions from various sources to contaminated sites, distinguishing natural background and diffuse anthropogenic background from specific pollution sources, differentiating specific sources of petroleum and natural gas, delineating time frames of releases, reconstructing historical concentrations and pathways of releases for dose reconstruction in toxic torts, and conducting causal analysis to determine associations between observed conditions and potential sources. A detailed analysis with examples is presented in this chapter to shed more light on this evolving subject.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Chemistry, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia

    Ilija Brčeski

  2. European Academy of Science and Arts, Salzburg, Austria

    Ilija Brčeski

  3. International Clean Water Institute, Manassas, VA, USA

    Ashok Vaseashta

  4. Institute of Electronic Engineering and Nanotechnologies “D. Ghitu”, ASM, Chisinau, Moldova

    Ashok Vaseashta

  5. Institute of Biomedical and Nanotechnologies, Riga Technical University, Riga, Latvia

    Ashok Vaseashta

Authors
  1. Ilija Brčeski
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  2. Ashok Vaseashta
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Correspondence to Ilija Brčeski .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. International Clean Water Institute, Manassas, VA, USA

    Ashok Vaseashta

  2. Faculty of Civil Engineering, Transylvania University of Braşov, Brasov, Romania

    Carmen Maftei

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Brčeski, I., Vaseashta, A. (2021). Environmental Forensic Tools for Water Resources. In: Vaseashta, A., Maftei, C. (eds) Water Safety, Security and Sustainability. Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76008-3_15

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