Streamside Management Zones Compromised by Stream Crossings,Legacy Gullies,and Over‐Harvest in the Piedmont

Streamside management zone (SMZ) breakthroughs were identified and characterized to determine frequency and potential causes, in order to provide enhanced guidance for future water quality protection. Ten kilometers of SMZs were carefully examined for partial or complete breakthroughs. With partial breakthroughs the SMZ trapped sediment before it reached the stream, while complete breakthroughs appeared to have allowed sediment to have passed through with minimal restriction. A total of 41 breakthroughs occurred (33 complete, 8 partial) across 16 sites, averaging 1 complete breakthrough per 0.3 km of SMZ length. The most common complete breakthroughs were caused by stream crossings (42%), reactivation of legacy agricultural gullies (27%), and harvest related soil disturbances near/within SMZs (24%). Pearson correlations of site characteristics at breakthroughs indicated no strong relationships between breakthrough sites, representing the variable nature of these unique circumstances. Stream crossings are an intentional breakthrough for access purposes, but resulting environmental impacts can be reduced with best management practice implementation. Current recommendations for SMZs tend to work in most situations, yet further research is needed to identify causal factors and quantify breakthrough severity.     

Could wastewater analysis be a useful tool for China? — A review

Analysingwastewater samples is an innovative approach that overcomesmany limitations of traditional surveys to identify and measure a range of chemicals that were consumed by or exposed to people living in a sewer catchment area. First conceptualised in 2001, much progress has been made to make wastewater analysis (WWA) a reliable and robust tool for measuring chemical consumption and/or exposure. At the moment, the most popular application of WWA, sometimes referred as sewage epidemiology, is to monitor the consumption of illicit drugs in communities around the globe, including China. The approach has been largely adopted by lawenforcement agencies as a device tomonitor the temporal and geographical patterns of drug consumption. In the future, themethodology can be extended to other chemicals including biomarkers of population health (e.g. environmental or oxidative stress biomarkers, lifestyle indicators or medications that are taken by different demographic groups) and pollutants that people are exposed to (e.g. polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, perfluorinated chemicals, and toxic pesticides). The extension of WWA to a huge range of chemicals may give rise to a field called sewage chemical-information mining (SCIM) with unexplored potentials. China has many densely populated cities with thousands of sewage treatment plants which are favourable for applying WWA/SCIM in order to help relevant authorities gather information about illicit drug consumption and population health status. However, there are some prerequisites and uncertainties of the methodology that should be addressed for SCIM to reach its full potential in China.