Fresh water is a scarce resource threatened by multiple factors such as population growth, pollution or drought. In addition, as the source of most drinking water, it must be monitored and conserved to guarantee increasingly demanding levels of quality for human consumption.
It should be noted that the cyanobacterial blooms in reservoirs currently constitute a relevant danger to public health and the environment, due to the fact that the production of toxic metabolites, called cyanotoxins, has short and long-term effects on human health.
In this context, the processes that are carried out in drinking water treatment plants are especially important since monitoring could warn sufficiently in advance about the existence of cyanobacteria and anticipate with sufficient time the decisions that must be taken in the water treatment plants to produce drinking water of a quality suitable for human consumption.
This is how the Cyanoa project whose objective is to provide new technologies and tools to help water treatment plants anticipate when and where cyanobacteria will flourish, in order to decide the necessary treatments to achieve the parametric values of the legislation.
Until September 2025, the research team, made up 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 to monitor the proliferation of cyanobacteria in real time, and on the other, 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 with 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 Hydrographic Confederation.
Cyanoa, with a budget of almost 800,000 euros, is subsidized by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, the State Research Agency, within the Recovery, Transfer and Resilience Plan and the Next Generation European Union.
