A new, natural venue for water quality monitoring (WQM) - Tampines Eco Green (TEG)

Invited by Nparks to help design and implement a water quality monitoring (WQM) programme, I found myself in one of their latest natural attractions – Tampines Eco Green (TEG) accessible from Sun Plaza Park along Tampines Avenue 9.


For those who are expecting fast food joints nearby, lots of parking space and plenty of lighting for an evening walk, you will be quite disappointed as there is none of the above.

Even the toilet is not the normal kind you find in other parks as it is supposedly the first of its kind in an Nparks park – an eco toilet that makes use of composting to treat your waste. It has no water for washing. Instead you press for hand sanitiser gel from that wall dispenser. No water is available for flushing. Instead, wood chips are "dumped" into the toilet bowl to help in the composting process. For those who can’t get used to such a setup for your sanitary needs, a few portable toilets are located nearby. Personally, I prefer the well ventilated eco toilet to the tightly confined space of a portable toilet with its characteristic chemical odour. (Opps, I seemed to have said too much about the toilet rather than the WQM aspects of TEG.)

But for those who enjoy a relatively natural environment for their bird watching, firefly appreciation or WQM, TEG scores very high. Formerly made up of sand quarries (and I heard it was also used as a dumping ground), TEG is now marshes and shrubs. The trail is not gravel or dirt but a comfortable carpet of turf grass.

It is outfitted with a handful of ponds of yet to be examined water quality. A few seemed to be favoured by apple snails as evident from the pink clusters of snail eggs. Some were observed with pond skaters on the water surface and dragonflies skirting the above-water vegetation. As with the water quality, the kind of aquatic life below the surface has not been surveyed.

Figure: The roughly 2-km trail surrounds several ponds of unknown water quality.

Figure: "Pond 1", nearest to the entrance, is quite muddy.

Figure: "Pond 2" is starting to show signs of algal mat formation. Is it triggered by nutrients in the water? If so, where do the nutrients come from?

Figure 3: Clear (at least in the middle and right) brownish water suggests presence of dissolved organic matter e.g. tannins in "Pond 3".

Figure: Eco toilet with composting - supposedly first of its kind in Nparks jurisdiction

Figure: Bioswales like this one are found around the trails in the park. They are supposed to clean up the water draining through the park before discharging into a nearby canal. Are they effective? No one has tested them yet.

Water quality monitoring (WQM) workshop for Sengkang Floating Wetland

I have a rare opportunity to conduct a WQM workshop at Sengkang Floating Wetland which lies smack in the Punggol Reservoir. All thanks to PUB for arranging the venue and coordinating the overall workshop!

At the same time, this workshop was funded by the Water Education Fund from FairPrice which also sponsored my book - Your first guide to water quality monitoring in Singapore. Not surprisingly, all the participants were given a copy of the book to help them implement their own WQM programme.

 Figure (courtesy of PUB): Classroom lesson at Anchorvale CC before heading out to the field

Figure: Getting water samples on the floating wetland was made easy with the help of contract workers who happened to be there maintaining the wetland

Figure: In the middle of the floating wetland 

Figure: Participants getting their hands wet and dirty along Punggol Reservoir

Question on phytoremediation

Dear Mr Kwok,


My name is C and I am a marine life enthusiast like yourself. I recently had the opportunity to visit a few fish and shrimp farms in Brunei. These farms are in land farms beside the coast. I noticed that in some of the ponds the water is obviously highly toxic with large amounts of foam floating on the surface. Owner confirms that the water in these ponds have not been changed for 1-2 months.

As each pond is approximately 10 metres by 25 metres and 2 metres deep, each farm has 40-50 ponds, it may be expensive to perform frequent water change such as those done by owners of reef aquariums.

So if there are say 20 such farms in the area, each discharging the waste water directly into the sea, wouldnt the water quality in the area be adversely affected?

The question I have for you is this:

1) In a reef aquarium, we use a protein skimmer to remove dissolved organic materials and water changes to dilute the toxic compounds in the water. This is obviously too expensive for commercial fish farming. Some hobbyists have experimented with using mangrove saplings to remove dissolved organics as a replacement for the protein skimmer. Is it possible then, to grow mangrove on floating pontoons in the fish pond? Would this be a cost effective way to improve water quality in the pond and there by improving food safety?

2) What are the issues we might have to think about if we want to plant mangrove on floating pontoons?

Thanks and regards,

C



Dear C,

You may want to read through my posts on phytoremediation 

especially Singapore latest water attraction - Sengkang Floating Wetland and Before you write off a plant as a weed, read this


There are certainly many issues involved in phytoremediation via mangrove plants on floating pontoons aka floating wetlands, from conception, evaluation, design, implementation, operation to management.


I will attempt to touch on those that are close to my heart though I am sure there many other important ones which I will miss out.

1. I assume you want to use mangrove plants (I suppose you are referring to the tree types) because the water is brackish or salty. I strongly believe mangrove trees have a lot of potential to perform phytoremediation, especially removal of nutrients from pond water. However, though widely used in Asia and other tropical countries, documentation of their implementation and effectiveness are still lacking compared to other “traditional” phytoremediation plants. Certain salt marsh plants (e.g. cordgrasses, seaside rush) have been documented to be successfully used in brackish/salty water. Nevertheless, I would still encourage you to try mangrove trees since they are very much part of our natural heritage.


2. Cost! This can be a big issue if you are using any of the proprietary floating mats for holding your plants. There are many high-tech mats out in the market and they will cost you more than having a similar constructed wetland built on land. Alternatively, you can go the DIY route. I have seem floating platforms made out of bamboo, plastic bottles and other recycled materials.


3. One gripe I have with floating wetlands is their short reach with respect to the depth of the water body. You mentioned that you intend to use such floating wetlands to remove dissolved organics. Ideally, you will need a good root system well distributed laterally and vertically in the pond to achieve that. The root system allows bacteria to flourish and these are the guys on the ground removing your organics. Hence, the mangrove roots will need to go as deep as possible but a floating mat by its nature can impede the spread of the roots.


4. What about harvesting? Do you intend to remove the plants periodically? What if they grow too big for your mat to support? On the other hand, you need your plants to be big to be efficient in phytoremediation (think more biomass to absorb the nutrients or more roots with longer reach for bacteria to grow). Of course, harvesting and replanting will incur more costs.


Good luck!

 Figure: a DIY floating wetland in a pond in Chinese Garden

Figure: Rhizophora sp. in Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve - a mangrove tree that has potential in phytoremediation, especially in brackish/saline waters