Aquatic resources play a key role in supporting and maintaining human activity by providing potable water supplies to meet growing drinking and agricultural water requirements and are used as receiving streams in the disposal of treated wastewater effluent. In this talk, the results of a field study conducted within a well-characterized reservoir system that is heavily supplemented by the Upper Occoquan Sewage Authority (UOSA) advanced wastewater treatment facility are presented. Samples were collected upstream and downstream of the wastewater discharge point and characterized by fluorescence excitation-emission matrix spectroscopy and parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC). The purpose of this research was to investigate the impact of treated wastewater effluent on the characteristics and behavior of organic material in a receiving stream.

Collectively, the results of this study suggest that organic material produced during the activated sludge process has unique properties (fluorescence and sorption coefficients) compared to NOM found in the receiving stream. PARAFAC identified three individual fluorophore moieties, which were attributed to humic-like, fulvic-like, and protein-like materials. The relative distribution of the three fluorophore fractions varied among the different land use catchments, especially in locations of known anthropogenic activity. Distinctive relationships between the fulvic-like and protein-like materials were observed for catchments known to be influenced by anthropogenic activity and those believed to reflect more natural environments, suggesting that this technique could be used to monitor human impact on aquatic systems.