Information is key if you want the best aquatic environment

Software which can help manage effluent discharge or monitor shellfish stocks is designed to be used by anyone, writes Karlin Lillington

IMAGINE A warm weekend in the UK: holidaymakers head for the coastal resorts, and the numbers visiting Blackpool start to rise. With the influx comes a jump in sewage and wastewater, and treatment plants discharge more effluent into the sea. The wind direction suddenly changes - will pollutants threaten the crowded beaches?

Thanks to a software system from Galway company Marcon Computations International, the UK's Environmental Agency can quickly manage such situations in the Mersey, Ribble and Severn estuaries, and in Morecambe Bay, and decide whether beaches need to be closed or discharge pipes shut down.

According to Paul Simmons, principal environment planning officer for the Environment Agency, evidence produced using the software confirmed the need for a new £95 million (€120 million) sewerage system for Preston town centre.

Marcon pairs geographical information systems (GIS) to its own MarGIS (Marine GIS) software so that planners can monitor water systems along coasts and key in changes in currents, weather, organisms, pollutants - basically, anything that is in the water that or affects it.

"The whole concept is to make this complex area simple to use, to put a window into it," says Alan Berry, Marcon managing director.

Closer to home, shellfish stocks can be better monitored due to software which Marcon is producing in partnership with Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM). Using BIM data on shellfish stocks, spawning and growth patterns, and available nutrients in the water, the software analyses whether mussel and oyster farms can be expanded in aquaculture regions like Killary Harbour or Dungarvan. MarGIS can provide detail on the growth of a single average mussel, or a bed, or an entire coastal region.

It is also used to assess where and when to harvest lobster. Understanding where juvenile lobsters develop in a given year - whether in the same area as adults, or further down the coast, carried by currents - helps determine how heavily fishermen can harvest stock.

Without such software, getting similar information would involve hiring consultants to produce reports full of static data, a process that can take weeks or months. By contrast, says Berry, Marcon takes existing data from specific regions and plots them to a complicated numerical model that can both monitor current conditions or produce "what if" scenarios.

Berry says Marcon's market is any sector that needs to understand and maintain a good aquatic environment - though the software can also be used for managing air quality.

To take a topical issue, the company's software could be used to accurately plot disputed chromium levels in Cork Harbour, Berry says, and would enable harbour officials to better predict and respond to any rise in pollutants.

Marcon was set up in 2001 on the foot of Berry's graduate work at NUI Galway. An engineer, Berry was interested in finding ways to produce better algorithms - numerical formulas - for measuring the behaviour of wind and currents on irregular bodies of water, like Galway Bay.

As part of his graduate work, Berry built a 3x2 metre, topographical scale model of the bay out of resin, modelling clay and fibreglass sealant, filled it with water, and stuck it in a wind tunnel at the university.

"It was like a good-sized paddling pool," he jokes. While the underlying physical principles of wind on water movement were well understood, he says, existing formulas were modelled on sticking rectangular boxes of water in wind tunnels.

Using his mini-Galway Bay, he fine-tuned those general principles to create algorithms to apply to real bodies of water. "We developed a new relationship between wind speed and currents in water," he says.

From that information, Marcon could better understand how water circulates around coasts and developed MarGIS, which lets the company produce software for organisations that monitor bodies of water in a broad range of environmental contexts.

"Our unique selling point is that we develop bespoke applications for a number of major players," such as environmental and other semi-state agencies, Berry says. They have few competitors - mostly, they're going up against big software firms that produce generic modelling software that requires very experienced users.

MarGIS is meant to be used easily by anyone. "It's a system designed to be interrogated and used," he says.

"Lots of people consider numerical analysis to be a kind of black art - no one knows if the answer they get is real or not. But with our software, agencies have control, and it's their own data. There's never a grey area about how accurate it is."

To date, the company, with three full time and two part time positions, has been privately funded. "The next stage is moving to 10 to 15 people, and we'll need to go for suitors," says Berry, something he says Marcon plan to do within the next three-five years.

They are looking to the US market as well, where they have partnered with some companies.

Given increasing international focus on environmental issues, Berry believes "there's a wealth of opportunity out there for the likes of the systems we develop".