D. Kolesch – Master’s student from the Technical University of Munich

Dominik Kolesch from TUM stayed from 05.03. – 04.09.2018 at the ICWRGC to write his master thesis dealing with “Derivation of a Meta-Indicator for Water Quality by Comparison of Existing Water Quality Indicators and Indices with GEMStat Data”. He successfully completed this thesis in October 2018.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has shown that better protection of freshwater biodiversity and the health of aquatic life is imperative. SDG 6.3.2 demands an index to describe water quality in terms of ecological health. This study uses a new approach to a meta indicator for describing riverine water quality, resulting in 3 parameter sets for water quality measuring. The index has been applied in 2 rivers, Rio Tietê (Brazil) and Ebro (Spain). The chosen CCME Water Quality Index (WQI) was tested against existing applications of WQIs in the researched regions.

Indexing is an efficient tool of displaying complex data in an aggregated form. The goal of the study was to describe water quality in rivers. The real challenge is to tackle the whole river health. In the future, with some improvements based on the present approach, a new subindex for water quality will be developed and add a more precise piece to the puzzle.

If you are interested in reading the entire pdf of the master thesis, you may contact Dominik: