An innovative approach to monitoring non-point source pollution at a field scale: online monitoring system for continuous cropping with a serial pipeline

Highlights

	● An innovative online monitoring system was developed for non-point source pollution under continuous cropping.
	● More precise and lower labor cost automatic monitoring of water quantity and quality was realized in the system.
	● This monitoring system could be particularly valuable for the next national pollution source census in China.

Abstract

Non-point source (NPS) pollution has been the major cause of water quality degradation. However, there are still shortcomings in the current monitoring methods for NPS pollution, such as small monitoring range, error of monitoring data, time-consuming and laborious monitoring process. Although the established method, field experiment plots, was used effectively in the first and second national pollution source census in China. However, when the results obtained by monitoring experimental plots are extrapolated to a field or larger scale, there are considerable uncertainties because of the characteristics of large spatial and temporal variation of farmland. To optimize the farmland surface runoff monitoring methods, an online monitoring system for continuous cropping based on a serial pipeline was developed, which takes diversion trench, online flowmeter and dynamic acquisition device as the main body. Compared with the current farmland monitoring methods, this system can realize more precise automatic monitoring of water quantity and quality, and lower costs. This innovative method will provide greater confidence in the actual monitoring of NPS pollution from farmland and wider practical application. This new method could prove particularly valuable for the next national pollution source census in China.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Farmland runoff / online monitoring / auto-collection / agriculture / non-point source pollution

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Key S&T Special Project of Yunan Province (202202AE090034, 202402AE090024), National Natural Science Foundation of China (42107410, 42477441), Hebei Financial Aid Program for Introduced Overseas Scholars (C20230337), and Local Science and Technology Development Fund Projects Guided by the Central Government in Hebei Province (246Z3607G).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Peipei Feng, Gaofei Yin, Qingyi Zhu, Tongyang Li, Bin Xi, Xiaoyuan Xu, Huiqing Jiao, Hongda Wen, Lingling Hua, and Wenchao Li declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2024. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)