Lake water quality monitoring tools

Lakes as ecosystems provide many goods and services. To benefit from them in long term we must assure sustainable management. SIMILE (informative System for the Integrated Monitoring of Insubric Lakes and their Ecosystems) project is focused on developing efficient monitoring of lake water quality since it gives the critical input for adequate management. The lakes of interest for SIMILE are the Insubric lakes Como, Lugano, and Maggiore. The paper is focused on describing which tools are used in the SIMILE project to exploit different sources of lake water quality data: in-situ high-frequency monitoring (HFM) through sensors, satellite observations, and data collected by citizens. Even though the paper is focused on the SIMILE project, and thus on tools and procedures for the Insubric lakes, it can serve as an example for other lakes too, especially because the tools developed in the project, such as a collaborative platform for sharing satellite-derived water quality parameters, and mobile application and web administrator interface for citizen science, are free and open-source, they can be easily adapted if needed. Moreover, the procedures for the processing of data coming from different sources are based on free (and often also open source) software and are well documented. The tools and procedures described in this paper might be a foundation for similar practice for lakes worldwide, and thus a step forward the 6th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of the United Nations (“Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”).