Freshwater is a scarce resource threatened by multiple factors such as population growth, pollution, and drought. Furthermore, as the source of most drinking water, it must be monitored and conserved to guarantee increasingly demanding quality standards for human consumption.
It is worth noting that cyanobacterial blooms in reservoirs currently constitute a significant danger to public health and the environment, because the production of toxic metabolites, called cyanotoxins, has short- and long-term effects on human health.
In this context, the processes carried out in drinking water treatment plants take on special importance since monitoring could warn in advance of the existence of cyanobacteria and anticipate in time the decisions that must be made in water treatment plants to produce drinking water of adequate quality for human consumption.
Thus the CYANOA project arises, whose objective is to provide new technologies and tools to help water treatment plants anticipate when and where cyanobacteria will bloom, in order to decide on the treatments necessary to achieve the parametric values of the legislation.
Until September 2025, the research team, comprised of Facsa, the Complutense University of Madrid, Eurofins Iproma, and the Autonomous University of Madrid, will develop, on the one hand, an Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV, a robotic aquatic drone) capable of monitoring cyanobacteria blooms in real time, and on the other hand, a model of the reservoir under study, including its hydrodynamics, ecology, and toxicology. Finally, the project will develop a digital information management solution based on geographic information systems with an integrated decision support system trained using machine learning techniques.
These pilot tests are being carried out in the Guajaraz reservoir (Toledo), with the collaboration of the Toledo City Council and the Tagus River Basin Authority.
CYANOA, with a budget of almost €800,000, is subsidized by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, the State Research Agency, within the Recovery, Transfer and Resilience Plan, and the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR.
