Emerging contaminants enter Australia’s marine environments in effluent discharged from 122 coastal Waste Water Treatment Plants (WWTPs). Additionally, diffuse sources of pollution, such as stormwater, also distribute contaminants in marine environments, and are forecast to become more extreme and episodic as the climate changes.
Little is known about the fate, concentration, or ecological effects of emerging contaminants in coastal waters. Lower trophic levels, including bacteria and microalgae, underpin ecosystem health and respond rapidly to environmental disturbances, making them useful indicators of water quality. There is a growing toolkit for determining the taxonomic and functional diversity of marine microbes, and this can be combined with contaminant quantification to understand how pollution affects ecosystem health.
The National Environmental Science Program Project 2.4 is a nationally-funded project to measure the concentrations of emerging contaminants released in treated effluent though WWTP coastal outfalls. We present data from this project on the concentration of emerging contaminants from WWTP outfalls in South Australia’s St. Vincent Gulf, a region with low contaminant dispersion rates. We team this chemical data with measures of flow cytometry to reveal how this pollution affects populations of bacteria and photosynthetic organisms.