Ferramentas práticas para diagnosticar e monitorizar a poluição ambiental em apoio à transição verde

Chemical pollution is among the most worrying threats to the aquatic environment, its ecosystems and the services they provide to mankind (e.g. food, employment, recreational, cultural). There is an ever-increasing variety of pollutant substances detected across the source-to-sea continuum, originating from urban, agriculture and industrial effluents. These cause ecological disequilibrium, loss of biodiversity and decreased ability of ecosystems to resist exploitation and climate change. In a world of intense water scarcity and a highly polluted ocean this limits water reuse and impacts human health and socio-economic well-being. Achieving cleaner and healthier aquatic systems relies on increasing information, new understanding and tools focusing on key pollutants, sources and pressures. Carrying out sustained diagnosis and aquatic effects monitoring is vital to address this. It allows identifying and managing emission sources and pressures, increasing the efficiency of treatments in WWTPs and prioritise areas for intervention to keep good ecological status. SIGNAL aims to address these challenges by developing a novel expeditious application of Raman Spectroscopy (RS) to environmental diagnosis and aquatic effects monitoring of pollution. A wealth of studies about the investigation of biological samples with RS (e.g. human samples, rodents, zebrafish and tilapia, aquatic snails and triops) is available in the literature and proof-of-concept of environmental diagnosis with RS applied to diatoms was recently published by the team, supporting the feasibility of this approach beyond the state-of-the-art. SIGNAL was thought to develop this innovative approach for practical application in functional verification in laboratory and real field scenarios (TRL4-5). The specific objectives are: i) investigation and application of RS under controlled laboratory environment, depicting requirements and limitations to detect effects of chemicals single and in combination, and characterise the potential mechanistic information about toxics that it may bring; ii) application of RS under real scenarios of freshwater to coastal contamination and characterisation of its predictive ability; iii) testing RS with different biological models (not covered by the Animal Welfare Act protection experimental animals) and contamination contexts to select the most sensitive, informative and easy-of-use, facilitating the final application, while reducing the number of animals in ecotoxicological evaluations; iv) produce monitoring data and information about the health status of target freshwater to coastal ecosystems in Northern Portugal (associated to Minho, Lima and Douro estuaries) using established methods and the innovative application to be developed; v) produce a draft methodological pipeline for future standardisation and implementation of RS to environmental diagnosis and monitoring; vi) develop and offer advanced monitoring training, for capacity building of stakeholders and raise societal awareness about the causes and effects of pollution and the importance of contributing to the dialogue for governance of the aquatic pollution. The approach followed combines physical principles with chemometric and ecotoxicological methods to produce needed datasets and high-throughput tools for holistic environmental evaluation, top-level scientific publications, data sharing through open access and advanced training for research and applied monitoring.