ESdat offers environmental standards in Excel format for both users and non-users of the software. The online environmental standards provide professionals with links to the publishers, and the original standards documents compiled into Excel for ease of use.
Assessment of soil, water and air quality often requires environmental regulatory compliance checks against one or more local, national, or international environmental standards that specify a maximum or minimum concentration that should occur for a compound. There are often dozens of compounds to be measured making the task quite complex.
At a practical level this is made more difficult as both the data collected and the environmental standards, by which they are measured, come in a large variety of formats such as data files like Excel for the former and text documents like PDF’s for the latter. To make the comparison and find environmental regulatory compliance and exceedances can be time consuming and difficult for scientists and engineers, involving a long series of cut and pasting and Excel model building.
When used with ESdat users can automatically import laboratory, field, logger, historical or other data, and select the guidelines, against which the data is to be compared. Exceedances of these guidelines can be flagged on either tables or graphs or maps, by font or background colouring or highlighting.
Guidelines that have been compiled include:
- Australia: NEPM, ANZECC 2000, Australian Drinking Water 04, Recreational water quality and aesthetics, NSW Service Stations, NSW Waste Guide, Victorian Waste Classification, WA Assessment levels for Soil, Sediment & Water Quality, SA Standard for the production and use of Waste Derived Fill, SA Environmental Protection Water Quality 2003
- US: EPA Regions 3,6,9 RSL, California Water Quality MCLs, Federal Water Quality MCLs
- Canada: Canadian Drinking Water, CWQG Water Aquatic Life, CSQG Soil, CSQG Sediment, Federal Interim Groundwater Quality Guidelines, Alberta Teir 1 Soil and Groundwater, Alberta Teir 2 Soil and Groundwater, BC Sch 4 Soil, BC Sch 5 Matrix Soil, BC Sch 6 Water, Ontario Reg 347 Sch 4 Leachate, Ontario 4697 Soil, Groundwater & Sediment, Ontario 7382 Soil, Groundwater & Sediment, Ontario 3303 Water Quality Objectives
- Dutch: New Dutch List
- UK: Landfill Directive, including EQS, Drinking, World Health Organisation, Soil Guideline Values, CL:AIR GAC
- Malaysia: Groundwater Guidelines
For more information please see the complete and latest listing of environmental standards at the EarthScience Information System’s website.