Introducing StormScout™ Technology
"A revolution in stormwater assessment"
"StormScout: Smarter, Simpler Monitoring for WSUD Performance"
WSUD features like raingardens and wetlands capture, filter, and treat stormwater runoff, removing pollutants such as heavy metals and hydrocarbons before they reach waterways. Over time, their efficiency can decline, potentially making them sources of contamination if not properly maintained. Traditional monitoring methods for pollutant removal are costly and labor-intensive, leading to limited assessment of WSUD performance. StormScout samplers provide a cost-effective alternative by using customized media to measure time-integrated pollutant concentrations in stormwater. By deploying samplers upstream and downstream of WSUD treatments, pollutant removal efficiency can be evaluated, helping asset managers optimize maintenance and performance.
Evaluate waterway improvement
Monitoring and Maintaining WSUD Stormwater Systems
WSUD Systems Filter Pollutants from Runoff
WSUD (Water Sensitive Urban Design) features like raingardens and wetlands capture and treat stormwater runoff from roads and other hard surfaces before it enters local waterways. When working properly, they trap pollutants such as heavy metals and hydrocarbons in their soil, filtration media, or vegetation, so the water leaving the system is relatively clean. However, these treatments lose efficiency over time, and without proper upkeep they can even start releasing the pollutants they collected.
Challenges in Monitoring Pollutant Removal
Despite their widespread use, WSUD installations are rarely monitored for heavy metal or hydrocarbon removal. Traditional "grab sampling" programs are labor-intensive and costly, requiring frequent manual sample collection and expensive laboratory analysis. Yet knowing each system’s pollutant removal efficiency and contamination levels is crucial for scheduling timely maintenance.
StormScout: A Cost-Effective Monitoring Solution
StormScout samplers offer a cost-effective way to track pollutant levels over time. They use a customized media that can be left in stormwater for extended periods, capturing an average concentration of pollutants such as heavy metals and hydrocarbons. By deploying these samplers upstream and downstream of a raingarden or wetland, one can measure how much pollution the WSUD feature removes. This information helps evaluate the system’s performance and decide when maintenance or clean-out is needed.
Stormwater Pollution Profiling: A Smarter Approach
Traditional stormwater sampling, like grab sampling, is costly and unreliable due to fluctuating water levels and pollutant pulses. Collecting samples during dry weather is often impossible, while storm events make it dangerous and impractical. Detecting short-lived pollution spikes requires extensive sampling, making traditional methods expensive and inefficient.
Our passive sampling devices solve these challenges by continuously accumulating pollutants in stormwater drains, providing a time-weighted average concentration over a set period. Unlike grab sampling, this approach effectively captures pulse pollution events and detects hydrophobic contaminants like pesticides, heavy metals, oils, and nutrients.
A key advantage is the ability to monitor multiple sites across a catchment simultaneously. By targeting major drainage junctions, pollution profiles can be developed quickly, identifying high-risk areas. This data helps stormwater managers focus compliance and education efforts, and, when needed, pinpoint pollution sources down to individual premises.
StormScout™: Smarter Pollutant Monitoring for Stormwater
In Australia and worldwide, monitoring aquatic pollutants is essential to meet regulatory requirements and protect human and environmental health. Traditional grab sampling is often ineffective in urban areas where pollutant concentrations fluctuate and episodic contamination events can be missed, making it difficult to trace pollution sources.
StormScout™ samplers overcome these challenges by passively accumulating pollutants over time, capturing episodic events that grab sampling would likely miss. Unlike costly auto-samplers, which require power and multiple sample analyses, StormScout is affordable, requires no power, and can be deployed widely across a catchment. Its small size allows placement in drains too small for traditional samplers, enabling water managers to efficiently track pollution sources through stormwater networks.
StormScout has successfully profiled stormwater quality across Melbourne’s largest industrial areas, supporting pollution reduction strategies. Bio2Lab continues working with government, industry, and water managers to prevent priority pollutants from entering waterways
Pollution profiling technology is ideal for:
- Local Government stormwater permit compliance
- Pollution response
- Risk analysis
- Water Sensitive Urban Design assessment
- Prioritising stormwater education and enforcement programs
- Pollution source-tracking
- Identifying chemicals of concern
