To examine the transport of potentially toxic chemicals from the land into the sea, Dr Ling Li, from The University of Queensland`s School of Engineering, takes his research underground.
Unlike most other studies into the leaching of agricultural-based chemicals into the sea, which focus on above-ground activities such as river flow and run-off, Dr Li’s work looks at what’s happening beneath the ground surface.
He has been awarded $60,000 in funding from the 2004 UQ Foundation Research Excellence Awards for a project examining the groundwater pathways of land-derived chemicals into coastal waters.
Dr Li is attempting to understand and measure the carriage of nutrients through submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) such as from the sugarcane-growing areas of north-east Queensland into the waters around the Great Barrier Reef.
The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme recently singled out SGD as an “…important but rather unknown source of contamination for coastal marine and estuarine environments”.
Dr Li, a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Modelling, said he hoped to develop a comprehensive monitoring system for field investigations of SGD and associated chemical transport as well as mathematical models for assessing and quantifying SGD and chemical fluxes into coastal waters.
His research in the area of coastal processes is well known in the world and has been widely cited by peer researchers.
One of his more than 40 scientific journal papers was recently ranked ninth in terms of the number of non-self citations among 368 pagers published in the same year (1999) by the scientific journal, Water Resources Research.
Dr Li garnered an Australian Research Council (ARC) Early Career Researcher award for his work.
He said the data gathered from his project was urgently needed in order to properly assess the impact of agricultural chemicals on marine environments.
“As the groundwater contamination problem worsens, the SGD may become a dominant source of coastal pollution in certain areas,” Dr Li said.
“In Moreton Bay, elevated iron concentration associated with groundwater discharge from acid sulphate soils has been implicated in recent Lyngbya outbreaks.”
Dr Li said the lion’s share of his excellence award funds would be spent acquiring the equipment needed to measure SGD including pressure transducers and seepage meters.
Dr Li was appointed to his present position with UQ in June 2002 after previous work as lecturer in environmental engineering at the University of Edinburgh (1999–2002) and Deakin University (1997–1998).
Media: For more information contact Dr Ling Li (telephone 07 3365 3911, email: l.li@uq.edu.au) or Shirley Glaister at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 2049, email: s.glaister@uq.edu.au). Videos and still photos are available at www.uq.edu.au/news/researchweek
