From Detection to Action: Innovating for Water Quality & Ecosystem Health

Inside the AquaHacking Binational Water Issues — Part 1 of 4

More than 35 million people across North America rely on the Great Lakes–St Lawrence River basin for their drinking water. Assuring the quality of water is increasingly important as this vital lifeline faces growing stress from industrial activities, agricultural runoff, and urban development.

Many of the threats moving through this vast freshwater system are becoming increasingly difficult to detect, predict, prevent, and stop. So now more than ever, we need innovative solutions to address this gap, protecting the health, economic prosperity, and long-term resilience of the communities and ecosystems relying on them.

Turning water challenges into innovation opportunities

Water quality is not one problem with one solution. To address these complex environmental threats, participants of the AquaHacking Binational Challenge are developing innovative solutions to measure, preserve, and improve water quality and ecosystem health.

To turn ambitious ideas into viable solutions, AquaHacking teams are mentored by Water Issue Leaders, industry experts sharing their perspectives and insights, guiding the teams towards building solutions that tackle the root causes of these issues.

• Alanna Condren – Analytical Scientist & Microplastics Subject Matter Expert, BASF
• Dr. Xiujuan Chen – Assistant Professor in Environmental Engineering,  University of Texas at Arlington
• Dr. Daria Popugaeva – Research Engineer,  Western University 
• Mark Payne – Supervisor of Environmental Monitoring and Enforcement, York Region Public Works

Across their work with the teams, three major areas of innovation stand out.

Main themes of this Issue

Reducing Microplastics in Waterways
Microplastics and synthetic microfibers, notably from synthetic textiles and vehicle tires, are accumulating throughout our freshwater systems. While municipal wastewater plants successfully filter out up to 98% of microplastics, up to 60% of the resulting nutrient-dense biosolid sludge is reapplied to agricultural fields as fertilizer in the U.S. Rainwater then washes these concentrated microparticles right back into rivers and lakes, creating a continuous loop of contamination. Because microplastic research is still in its early stages, long-term risks remain uncertain. This creates an important innovation opportunity. Stopping this cycle requires innovative workflows that can capture microplastics and trace them back to their origins before they enter our waters.

Stormwater Capture and Green Infrastructure

As cities expand, roads, parking lots, rooftops, and other impermeable surfaces prevent rainwater from being absorbed back into the ground naturally, sending massive volumes of stormwater runoff packed with sediment, nitrogen, and phosphorus, into waterways. These nutrient loads fuel harmful algal blooms and degrade freshwater habitats. Building and upgrading conventional wastewater plants is not always financially or operationally possible, especially in smaller and rural communities. That is creating a growing interest in Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) and green infrastructure such as constructed wetlands, rain gardens, bioretention systems, and permeable pavements. These approaches offer cost-effective ways to reduce and absorb flood peaks while naturally filtering out excessive nutrients before they reach water bodies. The innovation opportunity is not simply to prove that these approaches work. It is to make it easier to deploy, monitor, maintain, and scale across very different communities and watersheds.

Making the invisible visible: Data and Monitoring Tools

We cannot protect what we cannot measure. Water managers are being asked to respond to increasingly complex threats from harmful algal blooms or persistent heavy metals like mercury and lead to invisible per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that require advanced, scalable monitoring and detection tools. Tracking these threats is further complicated by natural hydrological dynamics, such as the seasonal "thermal bar" phenomenon that controls how pollutants migrate between shorelines and open water. Pollutants move. Conditions change seasonally. Monitoring locations are limited. To tackle these vast monitoring challenges, next-generation technologies need to leverage real-time sensors, AI-driven predictive modeling, machine learning, and remote sensing to bridge crucial gaps in long-term datasets and create opportunities to collect more information, across larger areas, at greater frequency, enabling faster and more efficient watershed interventions. The real goal is turning water data into earlier warnings and better decisions. If emerging risks can be identified sooner, communities, researchers, and water operators have a greater opportunity to intervene before environmental damage becomes more difficult and more expensive to address.

What are AquaHacking Innovators Building?

Thanks to the support and insights they received, the finalist teams of the AquaHacking binational Challenge have developed concrete and innovative solutions to tackle aspects of the Water Quality and Ecosystem Health issue.

AquaHQL
AquaHQL delivers continuous, in-situ monitoring of nanoscale emerging contaminants, including nanoplastics and nanometals, that current monitoring systems cannot detect. The platform provides particle-level intelligence to track contaminant dispersal toward drinking water intakes in real time.

EchiDNA Environmental

EchiDNA Environmental has created a high-volume, pumpless, reusable, room-temperature-stable environmental DNA (eDNA) filter that makes eDNA biomonitoring accessible beyond academic settings, enabling anyone to collect samples at low start-up cost.

Lake Monitor

Lake Monitor is a harmful algal bloom (HAB) monitoring program that uses field robotics, autonomy, and limnological methods to generate high-density bloom maps supporting operator decision-making and research, including in shallow-water HAB risk zones that monitoring boats cannot reach.

Limnetic Optical Solutions

Limnetic Optical Solutions has built an AI-powered underwater camera that makes freshwater monitoring simple, affordable, and non-invasive. The camera automatically detects fish and records only when wildlife is present, helping researchers and communities collect meaningful data while using less storage and power.

Portable Autonomous Imaging Cytometer (PAIC)

Team PAIC has developed a portable, affordable device that autonomously identifies and monitors aquatic microparticles directly in the field, tracking algae and microplastics between 5 and 500 micrometers. The device alerts users to emerging risks such as harmful algal blooms, eutrophication, biodiversity loss, and invasive species, enabling early intervention that protects ecosystem health and reduces costs for local communities.

CelluPure

CelluPure is developing a modular, cellulose-based filtration technology that uses advanced functionalized fibres to remove multiple contaminants in a single treatment step, helping industries meet regulatory requirements while reducing treatment complexity, sludge generation, and operational costs.

DMRI-UIC AquaTech Ventures

DMRI-UIC AquaTech Ventures has developed PurAsure™, a NOVEX-AMG®-powered passive in-line water remediation platform that continuously reduces pathogens and disrupts biofilm formation as water flows through existing infrastructure. Designed for stormwater, municipal, agricultural, aquaculture, and cooling-water applications, it offers a scalable retrofit that requires no electricity, chemical dosing, or complex operation, and has demonstrated greater than 6-log (99.9999%) pathogen reduction through laboratory and university validation.

WaterSentinel

WaterSentinel is a modular buoy that removes microplastics and other small particles from local freshwater systems through a four-step process: intake, electrocoagulation, cyclone filtration, and excretion.

To learn more about the innovators behind these groundbreaking solutions, please visit: https://aquaaction.org/aquahacking-binational-teams

From innovation to freshwater impact

Taken individually, these technologies address different dimensions of the water quality challenge. Taken together, they point to something bigger: innovation creates lasting impact only when solutions can work within the economic, operational, and environmental realities of those who will ultimately use them. This is where AquaAction and its ecosystem play a critical role, connecting innovators with the expertise, partners, and real-world perspectives they need to move from promising technologies to solutions that can be deployed, adopted, and scaled.

Join us on November 5^th to meet and discover all of them: https://aquaaction.org/en/our-programs/aquahacking-challenge/binational-finale-2026