The Foundations of Water Quality and the Environment Training Day is delivered by Donna Murray who has over 20 years' experience in river and estuary modelling work. This course provides water and environmental professionals with the foundational (or refresher) knowledge and skills for the assessment and management of water quality impacts, including pollutants, monitoring strategies, and legislation that drives investment decisions.
Date: Thursday 13th February 2025*
Location: WRc Office, Swindon
Duration: 1-day (Sandwich lunch included)
Places are strictly limited to 20 seats, on a first come, first served basis.
More than one person on your team needing to join? Then benefit from 10% off of your second ticket purchase, which is applied at the checkout. If the group is larger, then please contact the Academy team to benefit from bespoke pricing.
If you are interested, but unable to make this date, then please register your interest for the next one! Alternatively, if you are looking for whole-team or bespoke training, facilitated by engaging group discussions and led by our technical specialists and trainers, please ask us about our range of in-person and live online courses.
Course overview
This course has been designed specifically to provide water and environmental professionals with the foundational (or refresher) knowledge and skills for the assessment and management of water quality impacts.
Understanding and managing human impacts on the water environment requires a broad understanding of pollutant sources and pathways, monitoring and control strategies, plus the legislative framework that drives management and investment decisions.
Who can benefit?
Delegates may include early in their career in the water or environment industries, including those not of a scientific background, looking for knowledge of the basics of water science.
Participants may be drawn from any area of business or service where impacts of water quality affects their decision making. For example, water companies, regulators, water quality planners and environment officers.
Training outline
The course enables learners to become confident in the real-world application of water quality management. Modules facilitate structured discussions where delegates can reflect on relevant contamination concerns, and exercises such as calculation of sample quality, compliance assessment of example river data, and interpretation of model outputs for use in decision-making.
- Introduction to water quality: The background to catchment management and water quality assessments. This module will provide learners with knowledge of the sources of pollutants, pathways with which they move in the environment and how they can impact humans and ecosystems. It will also provide an understanding of the basics of hydrology and hydrogeology required to do this.
- Water management policy & regulations: The background to regulations such as the Water Framework Directive and other legislation and standards relevant to catchment management and the management of water quality such as discharge permitting. Learners are provided with an overview of national regulations and where to find out more about specific water quality standards for specific scenarios.
- Characteristics of pollutants: A synopsis of water chemistry and the characteristics of common pollutants, their sources and impacts. The concept of environmental toxicology is introduced and the benefits of this to the development of environmental quality standards is explored. Delegates also gain some insight into emerging contaminants in water.
- Environmental monitoring programmes: An awareness of the scope of environmental monitoring programmes, sampling and analysis, and bioassessment. This provides delegates with the knowledge, skills and experience relevant to monitoring environmental pollution.
- Water quality data assessment: Overview of the assessment of discharges to water, equipping learners with an understanding of their water quality dataset and know how to assess compliance. The background on assimilative capacity will link with the understanding of source apportionment in the catchment.
- Introduction to water quality modelling: An introduction to the various uses and benefits of water quality models, as well as some of their limitations. Delegates are shown examples of the use of models in scenario testing to annotate their potential different applications.
*Please note whilst WRc Academy endeavour to fulfil this offering, should a reason outside of our control, or the minimum number of delegates not be achieved, we reserve the right to refund and/or reschedule.
The price of the course is excluding VAT which will be added at the checkout. We encourage card payments for a speedy turnaround. If paying via PO, please allow 5 business days for our finance team to process the payment before the learner can be registered on the course.
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