Compliance monitoring and reporting of water, air and soil quality is now a fundamen- tal component of most major operations and can involve significant investment in labour and resources. The labour costs associated with field sampling can be particularly high, especially for remote locations, and the reporting process can tie up key personnel for months at a time.
Fortunately, recent developments in moni- toring technologies and data management systems offer a far more cost-effective means of meeting compliance monitoring and reporting requirements with increased data integrity and continuity.
There now exist a wide range of automated monitoring systems for water, air and soil quality with superior reliability to instruments of the past covering an ever-increasing array of parameters, many of which were previously unavailable in real-time systems.
Telemetry, once a costly and troublesome add-on, is now standard, easy to implement, relatively inexpensive and highly reliable, with data relayed in near real-time to the ‘cloud’ for secure viewing and retrieval from anywhere in the world.
Furthermore, these systems can now be deployed on a serviced lease basis by tech- nical specialists who handle all aspects of installation, maintenance and data collection and management. Such leasing arrange- ments eliminate capital costs associated with instrumentation and outsource maintenance and even the monitoring itself to a dedi- cated team to ensure maximum up time and data continuity.