Environmental Science and Pollution Research

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-31963-5

REVIEW ARTICLE

Deep learning in water protection of resources, environment,

and ecology: achievement and challenges
Xiaohua Fu1 · Jie Jiang1,2 · Xie Wu3 · Lei Huang4 · Rui Han5 · Kun Li6,7 · Chang Liu2 · Kallol Roy8 · Jianyu Chen2 ·
Nesma Talaat Abbas Mahmoud8 · Zhenxing Wang2

Received: 24 August 2023 / Accepted: 6 January 2024

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2024

Abstract
The breathtaking economic development put a heavy toll on ecology, especially on water pollution. Efficient water resource
management has a long-term influence on the sustainable development of the economy and society. Economic development
and ecology preservation are tangled together, and the growth of one is not possible without the other. Deep learning (DL)
is ubiquitous in autonomous driving, medical imaging, speech recognition, etc. The spectacular success of deep learning
comes from its power of richer representation of data. In view of the bright prospects of DL, this review comprehensively
focuses on the development of DL applications in water resources management, water environment protection, and water
ecology. First, the concept and modeling steps of DL are briefly introduced, including data preparation, algorithm selection,
and model evaluation. Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of commonly used algorithms are analyzed according to
their structures and mechanisms, and recommendations on the selection of DL algorithms for different studies, as well as
prospects for the application and development of DL in water science are proposed. This review provides references for
solving a wider range of water-related problems and brings further insights into the intelligent development of water science.

Keywords Deep learning · Machine learning · Water resources management · Water environment protection · Water
ecology

Introduction

Water is not only an important resource for humans but

Responsible Editor: Xianliang Yi
Xiaohua Fu and Jie Jiang contributed equally to this work.
also a basic component of ecological sustenance. Sustain-
able water resources, water environment, and water ecology
are invaluable for human health and sustainable economic
growth. But over the past half-century, factors such as popu-
lation growth, use of fossil fuel, deforestation, and human

4
* Zhenxing Wang School of Environmental Science and Engineering,
wangzhenxing@scies.org Guangzhou University, Guangzhou 510006,
People’s Republic of China
1
Ecological Environment Management 5
China Environment Publishing Group, Beijing 100062,
and Assessment Center, Central South University
People’s Republic of China
of Forestry and Technology, Changsha 410004,
6
People’s Republic of China Freeman Business School, Tulane University, New Orleans,
2 LA 70118, USA
State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Water
7
Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, Guangzhou Huacai Environmental Protection Technology
Ministry of Ecology and Environment, South China Co., Ltd, Guangzhou 511480, People’s Republic of China
Institute of Environmental Sciences, Guangzhou 510655, 8
Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu,
People’s Republic of China
51009 Tartu, Estonia
3
China Railway Water Information Technology Co, LTD,
Nanchang 330000, People’s Republic of China

Vol.:(0123456789)

activity caused serious environmental issues. Therefore, to
protect ecological safety and human health, (pan-national)
policies are formulated to enact. Reducing major pollutants,
promoting “human-water harmony,” and building a better
index to evaluate performance measures of integration, of
water resources, the water environment, and water ecology.
Recently, machine learning (ML) has been increasingly
applied to the field of water science (Buonocore et al. 2018;
Mauricio-Iglesias et al. 2015). Fuzzy logic, random for-
est, and decision trees are most commonly used to monitor
rivers, lakes, groundwater (Chau 2006; Sagan et al. 2020),
drinking water treatment (Li et al. 2021a), water quality
management (Yaseen 2021), wastewater treatment (Wang
et al. 2022), etc. These reviews help researchers understand
and expand the application of artificial intelligence in water
science. They can use their internal mechanism to select
the most important features from the original data, rather
than making the best choice through experience (Du et al.
2016). Although artificial intelligence technology plays a
crucial role in the modeling of water environment treatment
processes, it also has drawbacks such as large data volume,
weak adaptability, and inability to scale well. The difficulty
of model transformation makes it perform well in modeling
and prediction, but it is not ideal (Fulcher et al. 2013). Com-
pared with traditional artificial intelligence models, DL not
only has powerful feature extraction and recognition capabil-
ities but also has self-learning and self-completion functions,
which is an effective way to solve the modeling problem of
nonlinear water quality dynamic systems (Niu et al. 2020;
Yang et al. 2019). We have noticed that many review papers
on DL have been published in the field of water science.
We note that many review papers on deep learning have
been published in water-related fields, such as water quality
management (Wai et al. 2022), wastewater treatment (Alvi
et al. 2023a), water resource management (Fu et al. 2022;
Shen 2018), aquatic animal visual recognition and detection
(Shen 2018), and sewage pipe detection (Sun et al. 2023),
these reviews help researchers understand and expand the
application of deep learning in the field of water science.
However, so far, these reviews have been limited to one
domain or the application of a particular algorithm, lacking
a comprehensive review scope. Sit et al. (2020) conducted
a comprehensive analysis on this topic, but there is still no
in-depth analysis and suggestions on the application of dif-
ferent algorithms in different water problems.
Therefore, the motivation of our research is to further
expand the scope of the review based on the previous lit-
erature review. Firstly, the establishment process of the DL
model is briefly introduced, including data preparation,
algorithm selection, and modeling process, and its applica-
tion is summarized into three key tasks: water resources,
water environment, and water ecological management. In
our statistical meta-analysis of publications related to DL
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
and water science, we can see a steady exponential increase
in the average number of DL applications per year in the
water industry. We summarize the detailed applications of
DL into seven major application areas in Fig. 1 and provide a
detailed review of the applications in each area. More impor-
tantly, the advantages and disadvantages of representative
algorithms are discussed, and their applicability in different
scenarios and studies is analyzed by comparing their algo-
rithm characteristics. Finally, the future research potential,
research direction, challenges, and prospects in the field of
water science are prospected.
An overview of deep learning
Recently, deep learning has seen stellar growth. This comes
as a combination of many factors: availability of large data-
sets, compute power with GPU and TPU, and automatic
feature engineering from data. The neural layers are deeply
stacked and each layer learns a particular feature and passes
to the next layers on which it learns. The generalization
capability on the unseen test data distributions comes from
the deep architectures. A brief overview of how the DL
model is built is given in the following sections, for more
information on the specifics of the DL algorithm.
Data preprocessing pipeline
We gather data from open-source hydrological research data-
bases, experiments, and from simulations. Data preprocess-
ing takes a significant amount of time and effort. Data is
cleaned to remove the underlying noise and curated before
training the model. The hydrological data also has miss-
ing values, acquisition errors, and redundancies. The data
is read and through Pandas data frame and then converted
to Python numpy arrays. The input columns are chosen as
training inputs and the output column is training output. The
data is split into training, evaluation, and testing using stand-
ard libraries of Tensorflow/Pytorch.
Algorithm selection
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been developed for
over 70 years since it was first proposed in 1942. 1943 to
1969 were the first wave of research and development ANN.
Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) was developed (an MLP with
three hidden layers is shown in Fig. 3a). During the sec-
ond wave (after 1986) of development, more layers were
added and backpropagation was invented to train the models.
Deep learning has snowballed since 2006. Explosive growth
occurred after 2012, and the speed of innovative research has
been significantly accelerated. The deep learning develop-
ment process is illustrated in Fig. 2. The large circle in Fig. 1
Environmental Science and Pollution Research

Fig. 1  Applications of deep learning in the field of water protection of resources, environment, and ecology

Fig. 2  Timeline of deep learning development


Fig. 3  Typical structure and operation principles of MLP, DRL, CNN, RNN, LSTM, and GRU​
represents critical transitions in deep learning development.
The size of the small circle heralds the breakout scale of
deep learning this year. The upward oblique line indicates
that the popularity of deep learning is in the rising period.
In contrast, the oblique downward curve indicates that DL
popularity is declining. As can be observed, DL has devel-
oped very well over the last decades.
Supervised learning
Supervised machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelli-
gence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that involves training
a model on labeled data. In supervised learning, the algo-
rithm learns from a given dataset, which consists of input
features and corresponding target labels. The goal is to teach
the model to map the input features to the correct output
labels based on the provided examples.
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) The CNN is a type
of DL algorithm specifically designed to process structured
grid-like data, such as images or sequences of data. The CNN
is inspired by the organization of the visual cortex in animals,
where neurons are arranged in receptive fields that respond to
specific regions of the visual field. Similarly, CNN has layers
of interconnected neurons, known as convolutional layers, that
process local regions of the input data (Fukushima 2013). The
main key components of CNN are shown in Fig.3d.
Convolutional layers: These layers perform the core operation
of convolution, where small filters (also known as kernels) slide
across the input data and perform element-wise multiplication
and summation. The purpose is to extract local features, such
as edges, corners, or textures, from the input data. Activation
functions: After each convolutional layer, an activation func-
tion, such as the rectified linear unit (ReLU), is typically applied
element-wise to introduce non-linearities into the network. This
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
helps the network learn complex patterns and representations.
Pooling layers: Pooling layers reduce the spatial dimensions of
the feature maps generated by the convolutional layers. Common
pooling operations include max pooling, which selects the maxi-
mum value in each local region, or average pooling, which cal-
culates the average value. Fully connected layers: After several
convolutional and pooling layers, CNNs often end with one or
more fully connected layers. These layers connect every neuron
from the previous layer to every neuron in the subsequent layer.
Fully connected layers help to learn high-level representations
and make predictions based on the extracted features. Loss func-
tion: CNNs are typically trained in a supervised manner, and a
loss function is used to quantify the error between the predicted
output and the true labels. Common loss functions include cross-
entropy loss for classification tasks or mean squared error for
regression tasks. During the training process, the CNN learns to
automatically extract meaningful features from the input data,
allowing it to generalize to unseen examples. The weights and
biases of the network are adjusted iteratively using optimization
techniques like stochastic gradient descent (SGD) or its variants.
Dropout is a regularization technique commonly used in CNN
to prevent overfitting and improve the generalization ability of
the network. Overfitting occurs when the model learns to memo-
rize the training data too well, leading to poor performance on
unseen data. The idea behind dropout is to randomly deactivate
(or “drop out”) a portion of the neurons in a layer during training
(LeCun et al. 2015). This means that for each training example, a
fraction of the neurons are temporarily ignored or “dropped out”
with a certain probability (Hinton et al. 2012). CNN has been
incredibly successful in various computer vision tasks, including
water image classification, water object detection, and image
segmentation (this will be reviewed in detail in “Application of
deep learning in water environment” section). In addition, CNN
can also be used for water quality time series prediction/forecast-
ing. Just as 2D-CNNs capture spatial dependence by extracting
features from 2D patches of local input, their one-dimensional
counterparts, called 1D-CNNs, can identify local patterns in
time series or sequential problems (Pyo et al. 2021).
Sequence neural networks, also known as sequence
models or sequential neural networks, are a class of neu-
ral networks specifically designed to handle sequential or
temporal data. They are widely used in natural language
processing (NLP), speech recognition, time series analy-
sis, and other tasks that involve sequences. Sequence neu-
ral networks are capable of capturing dependencies and
patterns in sequential data by considering the order and
context of the input elements. Here are some commonly
used types of sequence neural networks:
Recurrent neural network (RNN) The RNN is the most fun-
damental type of sequence model. From Fig. 3c, the RNN
structure generally consists of the input layer, hidden layer,
and output layer. At each time step, the input of the RNN
includes the external input of the current step and the hidden
layer state of the previous step. These inputs are processed
through the weights and activation functions of the network
layer, which not only generate the hidden layer state and
output of the current step but are also cyclically sent back
to the hidden layer as part of the input for the next time
step. They process sequences by maintaining a hidden state
that acts as memory, allowing information to be propagated
from previous elements to future elements. This algorithm
is similar to traditional backpropagation, which unfolds the
network along the timeline to handle the gradients gener-
ated by each time step to update the weights in the network,
minimizing the error between the prediction and the actual
results. The RNN can handle sequences of arbitrary lengths,
making them suitable for tasks like language modeling,
machine translation, and sentiment analysis (Elman 1990).
Currently, the RNNs have relatively few direct applications
in the field of water science, in part due to their limitations,
and they do not perform well in learning and maintaining
long-term dependencies due to problems with disappearing
gradients or exploding gradients (Riedmiller 1994). As a
result, the RNN has relatively few direct applications. Most
studies tend to cite and compare newly developed models
with traditional RNNs to highlight the significant improve-
ments that have been made(Chen et al. 2018). In addition,
some researchers have tried to combine the RNN with other
ML algorithms in the field of water science to compare
the performance of individual algorithms and explore the
performance advantages of integrated methods over single
methods(Kumar et al. 2022; Ren et al. 2020; Xu et al. 2019).
Long short‑term memory (LSTM) The LSTM is a specialized
type of RNN that addresses the vanishing gradient problem,
which can hinder the training of traditional RNN. As shown
in Fig. 3e, LSTM uses a more complex architecture with gat-
ing mechanisms to control the flow of information and pre-
serve long-term dependencies, and these “gates” are neurons
with learnable weights that surround cell states to control the
flow of information. After training, the input gate is respon-
sible for determining which inputs are important enough to
be remembered by the network. The oblivion gate deter-
mines which past states should be preserved, and for how
long. Finally, the output gate determines how much infor-
mation is extracted from the cell state to produce the final
output. These gates work together to enable the LSTM net-
work to retain information for a long time while discarding
information that is no longer needed. In this way, LSTM can
effectively deal with long-term dependence problems with-
out being affected by disappearing gradients or explosions
(Hochreiter and Schmidhuber 1997). LSTM shows better
prediction performance indexes which are difficult to obtain
under the condition of model structure or data in the past. In
groundwater level prediction, Zhang et al. (2018) used the

dropout method in the LSTM layer to predict the monthly
scale groundwater level in an irrigation district, improving
the prediction and fitting ability of the model, and pointing
out its application value in areas without groundwater level
observation. In terms of rainfall and runoff forecast, under
standard data sets such as large sample catchment attributes
and meteorological datasets (CAMELS), the LSTM model is
more dominant than the traditional physical model in terms
of BiasRMSE, NSE, R2, and peak discharge deviation. As
for the relative deviation of low flow, different studies have
put forward inconsistent conclusions (Addor et al. 2017).
In the field of water quality and other related fields, Zhi
et al. (2021) established a river oxygen deaeration predic-
tion model on 236 river basins in CAMELS based on LSTM
and found that the model could reveal the trend of dissolved
oxygen decreasing with the increase of water temperature,
indicating the potential of predicting dissolved oxygen in
river basins without water quality measurement.
Gated recurrent unit (GRU) The GRU is similar to the LSTM
and also addresses the vanishing gradient problem. As
shown in Fig. 3f, the GRU has two gates: an update gate
and a reset gate. The role of the update gate is to deter-
mine how much past information is retained and how much
new information is received from the input layer. The func-
tion of the reset gate is similar to that of the forget gate
in the LSTM, which is used to control the flow of long-
term information. They have a simplified architecture with
fewer gating mechanisms compared to LSTM, making them
computationally more efficient (Cho et al. 2014). The GRU
is commonly used in scenarios where a simpler recurrent
model is sufficient, such as Gao et al. (2020) showed that the
GRU may be preferred for short-term runoff predictions due
to its lesser model training time requirements. In contrast,
Loc et al. (2020) indicated that GRUs might not perform
well when presented with extreme or outlier water quality
data; instead, LSTM is more adept at processing time series
data that exhibit strong regularity and smooth fluctuations.
It is important to note that both LSTM and GRU incorporate
features called “gating mechanisms,” which generally make
them superior to RNN and other ML models in terms of
storing and managing information.
Transformer The Transformer have gained significant atten-
tion in recent years due to their exceptional performance in
NLP tasks. Unlike RNN-based models, the Transformer oper-
ates in parallel and does not rely on sequential processing.
They employ a self-attention mechanism that allows them to
capture long-range dependencies efficiently. The Transformer
has been successful in machine translation, language under-
standing, and text generation. The Transformer can com-
pletely replace the recursion layer with a self-attention mech-
anism, which allows longer input sequences to be modeled.
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
However, the application of Transformers in water science
research is relatively rare. Castangia et al. (2023) have dem-
onstrated better performance than RNN in flood prediction,
because its attention mechanism can focus on a specific part
of the input, allowing the model to receive a larger feature
set. Making it more accurate in a shorter period. In addition,
researchers use a remote sensing module of the water envi-
ronment in the Transformer. The self-attention mechanism of
the Transformer can also help enhance the feature represen-
tation of boundary information and improve the accuracy of
semantic segmentation (Yan et al. 2023; Zhong et al. 2022).
Unsupervised learning
Unsupervised machine learning is a branch of machine learn-
ing where the algorithm learns from unlabeled data with-
out any explicit target or output variable. Unlike supervised
learning, where the model is trained on labeled examples to
make predictions or classifications. Unsupervised learning
focuses on discovering patterns, relationships, and structures
within the data itself. The primary goal of unsupervised
learning is to explore and understand the inherent structure or
hidden information in the input data. It can be used for tasks
such as clustering, dimensionality reduction, anomaly detec-
tion, and data visualization. (i) Clustering algorithms, such
as k-means clustering, hierarchical clustering, and DBSCAN
(density-based spatial clustering with noise application),
group similar data points together based on their inherent
similarities or distances. The goal is to identify natural clus-
ters or subgroups within the data. (ii)Dimensionality reduc-
tion techniques, such as principal component analysis (PCA),
t-SNE, and autoencoder (AE), aim to reduce the number of
variables or features in the dataset while preserving its essen-
tial structure, and they are very useful when dealing with
high-dimensional data. Popular generative models include
the Gaussian mixture model (GMM), variational autoencod-
ers (VAEs), and generative adversarial network (GAN). They
are used to model the underlying distribution of the data.
They can learn the patterns and generate new instances that
resemble the original data.
Unsupervised learning algorithms often require careful
preprocessing and feature engineering to handle missing
values, outliers, and other data quality issues. Additionally,
the evaluation of unsupervised learning results can be more
subjective compared to supervised learning, as there are no
predefined targets to measure against. Evaluation metrics
for unsupervised learning depend on the specific task, such
as silhouette score for clustering or reconstruction error for
dimensionality reduction. They are commonly used to detect
samples that are sparsely distributed and far from most data.
Unlike supervised learning algorithms that predict data
directly, this paper focuses on two popular unsupervised
models: GAN and AE.
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) GAN consists
of two parts: a generator and a discriminator, the goal
of which is to create data that is realistic enough that it
is difficult for the discriminator to tell whether they are
real or not (Wang et al. 2017). On the other hand, the dis-
criminator strives to be a better “detective,” distinguishing
between real data and fake data generated by the genera-
tor, and its training is in an adversus-game state (Good-
fellow et al. 2014), obtaining a large number of sample
data from a small number of labeled samples, while GANs
learn to generate high-quality data from a small number of
instances. This is particularly valuable in applications such
as aquatic ecological image recognition enhancement and
restoration, which will be reviewed in detail in “Applica-
tion of deep learning in water ecosystem” section. In par-
ticular, Wang (2021b) used GAN to optimize the fusion
of passive microwave and infrared data to estimate pre-
cipitation. After receiving both inputs, the GAN generator
generates fusion samples, which were then input together
with the real samples observed by ground radar. The GAN
discriminator calculated cross-entropy and other losses to
train the model and finally makes it difficult for the dis-
criminator to distinguish whether the input is a fusion
sample or a real sample. The trained generator can be used
to obtain the fusion precipitation, and the analysis results
from the aspects of precipitation intensity and development
situation showed that the method is closer to the ground
radar observation results than the Global Precipitation Pro-
gram Multi-Satellite Joint Precipitation Inversion (IMERG)
satellite precipitation products.
Autoencoder (AE) The AE is a typical unsupervised net-
work used in the water domain for feature extraction and
data dimensionality reduction (Jiang 2018). It is composed
of an encoder, decoder, and hider. The encoder is responsi-
ble for mapping the input data into the encoding space, and
the decoder’s goal is to reconstruct the input data as accu-
rately as possible, adjusting the weights and parameters of
the encoder and decoder based on the BP backpropagation
algorithm to make it as similar as possible to the original
data. Compared with PCA autoencoders, they can capture
both linear and nonlinear patterns present in training data,
which is very useful in dealing with complex nonlinear
hydrological systems. Depending on the modeling task, the
denoising autoencoder (DAE) can be used for wastewater
plant applications such as data reconstruction or denoising.
Reinforcement learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) is the learning of the intelli-
gent system from the environment to the behavior mapping,
to maximize the reinforcement signal function value. Since
there is little information given by the outside, the system
must rely on its own experience to self-learn, to improve the
action plan to adapt to the environment. In addition, we have
also made breakthroughs in deep reinforcement learning
(DRL), which refers to a set of methods to approximate the
value function (deep Q-learning) or strategy function (strat-
egy gradient method) through deep neural networks (Zhang
et al. 2019). The principle of RL is based on Markov deci-
sion process (MDP). In this process, agents obtain rewards
by observing and acting on the environment and adjust their
strategies based on the size of the rewards to maximize
future returns. We illustrate this principle in Fig. 3b. The
professional application of DRL in the field of water science
is still in the early stage, mostly applied to urban wastewater
systems. The professional application of RL in the field of
water science is still in its infancy, mainly applied to urban
sewage systems. Hernández-del-Olmo et al. (2016) showed
that RL can better control the DO set points of proportional
integration (PI) controllers compared with manually oper-
ated and ammonia-based PI controllers. Consider system
state variables (i.e., ammonium and DO concentrations) to
reduce operating costs.
Comparisons advantages and disadvantages
of the different DL models
Table 1 summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of
each of the DL models. This could serve as a quick reference
for future scholars who wish to have a fresh start in choosing
a suitable DL model in water science.
Modeling process
The general modeling process of a DL model includes steps
such as processing of variables to be input, data set partition-
ing, model selection, and parameter optimization (Fig. 4).
1. Preprocessing. Data sets containing input features and their
features are collected to build a feature variable database.
The data is preprocessed and cleaned to ensure that its
format is suitable for the learning algorithm. This step may
involve things like removing outliers, processing missing
values, normalizing data, or coding categorical variables.
2. Data set partitioning. The data set is partitioned into a
training set and a test set. The validation set is divided
from the training set to tune the model’s structure and
parameters, and the final evaluation of the model per-
formance is performed on the test set.
3. Model training. The data is used to train the model in
which the algorithm learns basic patterns and relation-
ships between input features and target labels. During
training, the model adjusts its internal parameters to
Table 1  Comparisons of advantages and disadvantages of different DL models
Model Advantages
CNN • Shared convolution kernel, no pressure on high-dimensional
data processing
• No need to select the feature manually, the weight training
is good, and the feature classification effect is good
RNN • Long-term dependencies in the sequence can be captured,
and a sharing strategy is adopted
LSTM • Solve the problem of gradient vanishing
• Capture long-term dependencies
GRU​ • Better than traditional RNNs at capturing long-term
dependencies, training is faster, takes less time, and is less
prone to overfitting
Transformer • The correlation between each word is calculated without
passing through hidden layers
• It can be calculated in parallel and can make full use of
GPU resources
GAN • The model is only used for backpropagation and does not
require Markov chain practice
• GANs can produce clearer, more realistic samples
AE • Strong generalization and unsupervised data annotation is
not required
DRL • Handle high-dimensional, non-linear state and action space,
and is suitable for complex decision problems
• Learn the optimal strategy adaptively, without the need for
artificial design features or rules
Disadvantages References
• Need to adjust parameters, need a large sample size, train- (LeCun et al. 2015; Li et al. 2019a)
ing is best done on GPU
• Overfitting risk, unclear physical meaning
• Gradient vanishing and gradient explosion (Hochreiter 1998; Riedmiller 1994)
• The training time is long; it is sensitive to hyperparameters,
and its interpretability is poor
• The computational complexity of LSTM is higher (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber 1997; Hu et al. 2018)
• It takes a lot of data to train
• The interpretation of gating mechanisms and the flow of (Cho et al. 2014; Salloom et al. 2021)
information within the network can be more difficult than
with traditional RNNs
• Local information acquisition is not as strong as RNN and (Castangia et al. 2023; Yosinski et al. 2014)
CNN
• There are problems with location information coding
• The interpretability is poor, and the distribution Pg(G) of (Goodfellow et al. 2014; Wang et al. 2017)
the generative model is not explicitly expressed
• GANs are not suitable for processing discrete forms of data
• For exception identification scenarios, the training data (Ballard 1987; Rumelhart et al. 1986)
must be normal
• Require a lot of data and computing resources to train, and (Van Hasselt et al. 2015; Zhang et al. 2019)
the training time is long
• Problems like overfitting can occur,
• For complex tasks, there are still problems of low learning
efficiency and unstable performance
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Fig. 4  Deep learning modeling
process
minimize the error or difference between its predicted
output and the true label.
4. Nonlinear activation and optimization. Appropriate
activation functions and optimization algorithms are
selected according to actual requirements. The activa-
tion function is used to increase the nonlinear expression
ability of neural networks, and different optimization
algorithms will lead to different training effects. The
commonly used optimization algorithms mainly include
Adam, AdaGrad, RMSProp, etc.
5. Hyperparameter optimization. Hyperparameters include
the number of neurons, learning rate, batch size, regu-
larization coefficient, etc. It is a combinatorial optimi-
zation problem, so it cannot be optimized by gradient-
based methods. Generally, evolutionary algorithms and
other methods are used to find the optimal solution, and
the common methods include the grid search method.
It is necessary to select a suitable hyperparameter opti-
mization method according to the characteristics of the
model.
6. Model evaluation. Evaluation metrics include classi-
fication measures (e.g., accuracy, precision, recall, or
F1 score, etc.) and regression algorithms (e.g., RMSE,
MSE, MAE, R2, etc.) to evaluate the performance of the
training model.
Application of deep learning in water
environment
To gain insight into the application of DL in the field of
Water Science research, on September 30, 2022, we ana-
lyzed publications on topics (“deep learning”) and (“water
science” or “water ecology” or” ecological resources”) in
the ISI Web of Science database from 2000 to 2022. The
number of 4928 publications and keywords of deep learning
in the water environment were analyzed using bibliometric
statistics and visualization methods. These findings suggest
that DL, as a new analytical tool, is playing an increasingly
important role in the big data era of ecological resource
research. Using the analysis and search results function of
WoS, all the search results are analyzed according to the
principle of metrology. Keyword Network Diagram Draw a
collaborative network diagram in VOSviewer. In a keyword
network diagram, a node represents a keyword. The size of
the node circle indicates the frequency of occurrence in the
graph. The strength of the relationship between keywords is
indicated by the thickness of the connections between nodes.
As can be seen from Fig. 5, the research contributions in the
field of water that are included in deep learning are mainly
focused on deep learning, machine learning, and water qual-
ity, remote sensing, and ecosystem.

Fig. 5  Trends of deep learning
papers based on WOS database
analysis in water science
research: a number of papers
by year and b co-occurrence
network diagram of research
keywords
Application of deep learning in water resource
management
Water resource management roughly refers to the activities
of adjusting and regulating water-related behaviors such
as development, utilization, protection of water resources,
and prevention and control of water disasters based on
the natural circulation law and comprehensive carrying
capacity of water resources. These tasks can be divided
into two categories: water drainage distribution system
and hydrology. In what follows, we reviewed the work in
these directions and first summarized and compared them
in Table 2 and 3.
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Water drainage distribution system
The rational allocation of water resources requires a com-
bination of water supply management and water demand
management. The application of deep learning in water
resource allocation mainly includes two aspects: water
demand forecasting and abnormal detection of water distri-
bution networks.
Short-term water demand forecasting helps with optimal
control of water supply systems, and its accurate prediction
helps to reduce operating costs and save energy. Recent stud-
ies have shown that DL achieves high performance in pre-
dicting daily water demand (Perea et al. 2023). Kavya et al.
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Table 2  Past research on water resource allocation using DL algorithms
Reference Parameter
Kavya et al. (2023) 10-min interval data (temperature and humid- LSTM
ity)
Salloom et al. (2021) Historical water demand data (updated every GRU​
24 h in 2016)
Guo et al. (2018) 15-min prediction and a 24-h prediction
interval
Liu et al. (2023) Daily water demand data from two water
plants
Du et al. (2021) 1660 daily water demand data (1 Jan 2016 to
11 Sep 2020)
Pu et al. (2023) 15-min interval total of 70,909 observations
(1 Oct 2019 to 30 Oct 2021)
Meijer et al. (2019) Over 2 million CCTV images
Wang and Cheng (2018) 3000 images
Yin et al. (2020) 3664 images and a data set of 4056 samples
Oh et al. (2022) 4456 sets
Song et al. (2021) 513 images with a size of 256 × 256 pixels
Zanfei et al. (2022) 3,000,000 sets (temperature, evapotranspira-
tion)
Shao et al. (2021) 64 pipe segments
(2023) compared 9 ML and DL models in their study, and
the results showed that the LSTM model can predict hourly
or subhourly demand by capturing features from previous
time-step demand, outperforming traditional ML models
in water demand prediction. To further improve prediction
accuracy, some studies have proposed using the RNN of the
GRU model to handle sequential relationships in historical
demand data, and introducing the unsupervised classification
method K-means to create new features, which can achieve
more accurate and reliable water demand prediction (Guo
et al. 2018; Salloom et al. 2021). In addition, most of the
existing achievements are single DL methods, and there is
relatively little research on coupled DL methods. To improve
the accuracy of daily water requirement, Liu et al. intro-
duced the STL method to decompose the smooth sequence
data into three groups, extract the effluent demand feature
data, and used AdaBoost ensemble learning to integrate the
Model Key contribution
• The DL performs better than the traditional
ML model
• The proposed method reduces the complex-
ity of the model by six times and maintains
the same accuracy
GRUN • The GRUN outperforms the ANN and
SARIMA models for both 15-min and 24-h
forecasts
STL-ADa-LSTM • The STL-Ada-LSTM model has the highest
accuracy in predicting SWDF while balanc-
ing the stability and simplicity of the model
DWT-PCA-LSTM • Both data pre-processing and optimal param-
eter selection techniques are used
Wavelet-CNN-LSTM • The wavelet-CNN-LSTM outperforms the
other models both in single-step and multi-
step prediction
CNN • To eliminate data leakage bias, “leave
two-inspections-out” cross-validation was
introduced
Faster R-CNN • This model was suitable for the detection of
sewer defects with high mAP and low miss
rate
CNN, YOLOv3 • The YOLOv3 network enables efficient and
accurate defect detection of urban drainage
systems
YOLOv5 • The YOLOv5 was superior to other standard
models YOLO and SSD in real-time sewer
defect detection
FCN • They propose a subsurface drainage pipe
detection approach based on DL with optical
images
GCRNN • The ability of the GCRNN to produce accu-
rate and reliable forecasting
Bayesian-SWMM • Reconstruct the complete profile of an
unknown discharging incidence in sewer
networks
LSTM model with AdaBoost-LSTM, which has the highest
prediction accuracy while taking into account the stability
and simplicity of the model. To decompose complex infor-
mation in time series, Du et al. (2021) proposed a preproc-
essing technology prediction of water requirement trans-
formation (DWT) and principal component analysis (PCA)
of mixed LSTM model combined with discrete wavelet.
Further, Pu et al. (2023) proposed the wavelet-CNN-LSTM
model, to consider the separation of low-frequency periodic
components and high-frequency random components in the
original time, the original time series is decomposed into
the third-order wavelet transform of approximate terms c­ A3
and detailed terms ­cD1, ­cD2 and ­cD3. The subsequent CNN-
LSTM model can more effectively capture the changes in
the model of characteristic short-term water demand data.
In general, DL shows good performance in water demand
prediction (e.g., LSTM and GRU). At present, there is room
Table 3  Past research on hydrology using DL algorithms
Reference Data Parameter Model Key contribution

Gao et al. (2020) 8022 hourly rainfall and runoff 153 sets (2000 Flow, precipitation LSTM, GRU​ • The GRU model performed just as well as the
to 2014) LSTM model, but the GRU required less model
training time
Han and Morrison (2022) 11,464,000 sets PVC, HLD, ROD, and HBG LSTM-s2s • The LSTM-s2s model obtained desirable
results for error forecasting
Sadeghi et al. (2019) 869,665 sets TP, FP, MS CNN • It has higher precision and detection ability
than traditional precipitation based on remote
sensing data
Yang et al. (2023a) 2960 indicators NH4+-N, COD, TP MLR, BPNN, GA-BPNN, LSTM • The moving average method was adopted.
Smooth the raw data. The LSTM water quality
prediction method has the best effect
Zhu et al. (2023) BB, WS, LDX, and XHB hydrological stations Temperature and streamflow Spatiotemporal deep learning • The improved accuracy of runoff forecasting
(2001/1/1 to 2015/12/31) rainfall-runoff (SDLRR) using IMERG or TMPA spatial information
Herbert et al. (2021) SWE and reservoir inflow T, 𝑚𝑖, 𝑘𝑖, 𝜆, α, β, θ LSTM-LSTM, ResCNN-LSTM • Long-term water supply forecasts of the opti-
mal deep learning algorithm proved superior to
the statistical method
Xu et al. (2022) Rainfall, evaporation, and discharge data at Discharge CNN-LSTM • The combination of CNN and LSTM or GRU
monthly interval (1976 to 1997) CNN-GRU​ realizes the deep mining of data characteristics,
which was superior to the solution of a single
model
Li et al. (2016) Two daily inflow series of the Three Gorges Reservoir inflow SAE, DRBM, FFNN, ARIMA • The two DNN models proposed are superior to
Reservoir and the Gezhouba Reservoir the traditional models in statistical criteria
Castangia et al. (2023) a set of 13 hydrological stations (1 Jan 2014 to River depth Transformer • The transformer was superior to RNN in terms
31Dec 2014) of RMSE and MAE
Zhang et al. (2018) monthly water diversion, evaporation, precipita- Water table depth Improved LSTM • The LSTM layer applied the dropout method to
tion, temperature, and time (2000 to 2013) improve the learning and fitting ability of the
model
Kabir et al. (2020) 2005 and 2015 flood dataset Water depth and streamflow CNN • The CNN model trained the 2 hydraulic model
and verified its performance in flood simulation
better than the traditional SVR
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
for improvement in the methods of daily water supply pre-
diction, and future studies can further explore the coupled
DL algorithm and other data processing methods to further
improve accuracy and stability.
DL method has been widely used in anomaly detection
of water distribution networks. It can map the pressure
data of the water distribution network with the abnormal
state of the network and use deep learning to explore the
abnormal state of the network. For instance, CNN was
used to solve the problem of multi-station leakage detec-
tion in the water distribution network and the historical
pressure data of the water distribution network is used as
input to predict the sensor pressure and finally determine
whether there is leakage at the pipe network site (Meijer
et al. 2019). Wang and Cheng (2018) proposed a convolu-
tional neural network faster R-CNN9 (faster region-based
convolutional neural network), which reduces the time
and labor cost of image detection and interpretation, and
increases the accuracy of defect detection. MAP achieved
83%, facilitating subsequent status assessments. However,
surface features (i.e., gullies and depressions) will result
in limited data availability. To solve this challenge, Song
et al. (2021) proposed a detection method for underground
drainage systems based on an optical image fully convolu-
tion network (FCN), which uses optical images to detect
drainage problems effectively. Kumar et al. (2020) used
a fine-tuned FCN algorithm to segment and measure the
damage of five types of sewage pipes. Compared with
the traditional masked region-based RCNN method, the
proposed method showed effective performance in the
damage detection of multiple similar sewer pipes under
a complex background. In addition, deep learning can be
combined with smart camera sensors on the Internet of
Things to analyze and classify images based on the sever-
ity of sewer congestion. For instance, the YOLOv3 net-
work detects aging devices in municipal drainage systems
through data-driven CNN image supervised learning to
provide technical support for estimation technicians (Yin
et al. 2020). More recently, Oh et al. (2022) proposed an
improved YOLO approach that improves the monitoring of
drainage systems via CCTV video text by integrating con-
volutional block attention modules (CBAMs). When faced
with the failure of IOT sensors, we can capture spatial and
temporal correlations between water demand time series
based on the concept of graphs (Zanfei et al. 2022). In
practice, because it is difficult to determine the location of
the emission source, the duration of the emission, and the
amount of pollutants emitted, a combination of a black-
box model and a hydrodynamic model can provide a more
accurate simulation. For example, a random water source
identification model combining Bayesian inference and
SWMM can reconstruct profiles of instantaneous water
mass incidence in sewer networks (Shao et al. 2021).
Some new methods and models are proposed for short-
term water demand prediction and anomaly detection
of water supply networks. The detailed contents of the
related literature are shown in Table 2. DL (e.g., CNN,
GCRNN, and FCN) have shown good performance and
application potential in these fields. Future research could
further explore how sensors can be combined with fluid
dynamics and DL models to build digital twin online
management platforms to better understand and control
the dynamics of water supply systems (Bartos and Kerkez
2021).
Water information management
Common applications of DL in hydrology include runoff
forecasting, flood forecasting, and flood warning. From
the summary of previous studies listed in Table 2, it can
be found that water flow is the parameter with the highest
research frequency, followed by the analysis of a large num-
ber of hydrometeorological data, to achieve accurate predic-
tion and monitoring of different hydrological processes and
achieve sustainable management of water resources.
The research of runoff forecast mainly includes rainfall-
runoff simulation and reservoir inflow runoff simulation. In
the rainfall-runoff simulation, most scholars focus on the
runoff simulation of a single watershed or a single station,
and a few scholars have carried out regional-scale rainfall-
runoff simulation research (Hu et al. 2018; Jehanzaib et al.
2022). The results show that both ANN and LSTM network
models perform well in rainfall runoff models, and are
superior to the traditional conceptual model and physical
model. In particular, the LSTM model outperforms the ANN
model in performance and has better simulation performance
(Rahimzad et al. 2021). To solve the problem of lack of
spatial rainfall information, Zhu et al. (2023) used SPP data
provided by satellites and improved rainfall estimation accu-
racy to establish a spatial-temporal deep learning rainfall and
runoff forecast model for hydrology stations in the upper
reaches of the Yangtze River, thus improving the accuracy
of runoff forecast. Although remote sensing data provides
high-resolution satellite information, there are still limita-
tions in estimating precipitation. Therefore, several studies
have explored the effectiveness of combining CNNS with
infrared (IR) and water vapor (WV) channels of geostation-
ary satellites to estimate precipitation rates (Sadeghi et al.
2019). In addition, this paper also proposes different input
preprocessing and deep learning hyperparameter optimiza-
tion methods to discuss, such as the encoder-decoder model
combining different input preprocessing methods and the
model using CNN, SVM, and GPR to jointly predict rainfall
data to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the prediction
model (Ehteram et al. 2023; Jamei et al. 2023). In the long-
term prediction of reservoir inflow, DL has the problems of

uncertainty and low accuracy. An earlier attempt was made
by Muluye and Coulibaly (2007) but failed to accurately
predict long-term inflow peaks. To improve the accuracy of
long-term prediction, multi-time hydrological grid data can
be connected to form video information. By combining CNN
and LSTM, complex spatiotemporal features can be con-
structed and extracted to predict the time step of reservoir
inflow in the future, which provides a new idea for improv-
ing the accuracy of flood prediction (Herbert et al. 2021; Xu
et al. 2022). In the hydrological and water quality forecast of
practical projects, the fluctuation of flow under meteorologi-
cal conditions and actual conditions is often ignored, result-
ing in the accuracy of the forecast model is not ideal. To
solve this problem, Yang et al. (2023a) proposed a method
based on multi-source data fusion, taking into account mul-
tiple influencing factors. The moving average method is used
to process the original data, and the accuracy of each model
is improved, among which GA-BPNN has the most remark-
able improvement effect. Compared to other prediction mod-
els based on deep neural networks or linear methods, LSTM
prediction models perform well on RMSE and R2. However,
in existing studies, the DL model is usually optimized for
its structure or coupled with other (physical hydrological
model) models to improve the forecast performance, and
there are few other upgrading methods. The DL model lacks
consideration of the mechanical factors of rainfall and run-
off. For example, coupling LSTM and WRF-hydro models
to improve runoff prediction (Cho and Kim 2022).
The urban flood control model based on hydrodynamics
has been relatively mature, with high simulation accuracy,
but high dependence on basic data. Even if the model uses
parallel computing technology such as GPU/CPU, it still
cannot avoid complex hydrologic and hydraulics calcula-
tions, and it is difficult to get a fundamental breakthrough
in the simulation speed. In contrast, studies using DL to
generate susceptibility maps have been widely used (Dodan-
geh et al. 2020; Gharakhanlou and Perez 2023; Karim et al.
2023), in particular, spatial sequence LSTM is more reliable
in flood warning and forecasting (Fang et al. 2021; Luppi-
chini et al. 2022). For forecast uncertainty information, some
studies have integrated the feature and temporal dual atten-
tion (DA) mechanism and recursive encoder-decoder (RED)
structure into the LSTM to establish a DA-LSTM-RED
model, which encourages the proposed model to extract key
input information for different types and moments of input
variables to improve the accuracy of multi-step-ahead flood
prediction (Cui et al. 2023). However, most studies ignore
the importance of developing appropriate feature engineer-
ing methods. In contrast, Transformer is an attention-based
neural network that processes all location information in a
sequence simultaneously through a self-attentional mecha-
nism without relying on cyclic connections. It is found that
Transformer is superior to recurrent neural networks and
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
recurrent neural networks in terms of RMSE and MAE, and
has lower requirements for recurrent networks. According
to the domain criteria, the forecast error obtained is consid-
ered acceptable, which proves the applicability of the Trans-
former in flood forecasting tasks to help reduce disasters and
losses caused by floods (Castangia et al. 2023).
In terms of flooding, the widespread adoption of seman-
tic segmentation models can annotate every pixel of an
object detected in an image and quickly predict observed
rainfall events and flood depths at unknown and known
spatial locations not included in the training dataset. Land
use/land cover (LULC) is one of the important indicators
of urbanization and plays a key role in flood modeling. For
example, Gong et al. (2022) proposed an end-to-end data
processing method using U-net and DeepLabV3 + to evalu-
ate its applicability in different watershed modeling systems
through pixelated LULC (Land use/land cover) semantic
segmentation. Additionally, in flood modeling, we need
to note that most existing ML algorithms are not suitable
for multi-output scenarios (i.e., predicting flood variables
(e.g., water depth)) for multiple cells in a single model. DL
models have achieved breakthrough results in the field of
computer vision, especially CNN, with the ability to extract
unknown features and learn compact representations (Chen
et al. 2021a). Kabir et al. (2020) used the CNN model to
train the 2 hydraulic model and verified its performance in
flood simulation better than the traditional support vector
regression (SVR) method through benchmark testing, which
provides great potential for real-time flood modeling and
prediction. These post-processing frameworks have achieved
a certain effect in improving the prediction performance of
the hydrological model (Han and Morrison 2022).
Application of deep learning in water
environmental protection
Water quality modeling and digital planning
Water quality forecasting refers to judging the pollution
level of collected water samples by giving historical meas-
urements or relevant data to provide the basis for pollution
prevention and source water protection. It is closely related
to water quality indicators such as pH value, conductivity,
temperature, biological oxygen demand, chemical oxygen
demand, total nitrogen, total phosphorus, chlorophylla,
etc. (Chen et al. 2020; Uddin et al. 2021). However, due
to random and systematic errors, noisy signals may con-
taminate water quality monitoring stations and experi-
mental data. DL has excellent processing power compared
to other ML methods, and DL is proven to be the most
realistic and accurate method for water quality prediction
(Singha et al. 2021). Water quality prediction needs to
consider the time sequence of input data, and RNN can
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
store and transform previous input information to support
decision reference and contribute to water quality system
management (Antanasijevic et al. 2013). RNNs perform
relatively poorly in long-sequence data processing. As an
evolution of RNN, LSTM can handle longer time series
problems (Liu et al. 2019). GRU is the variant of LSTM,
which can handle long-term sequences, shorten training
time, and obtain better results (Jiang et al. 2021). Due to
the dynamic nature and complexity of water quality time
series data, it is often difficult for a single model to deal
with the dynamic nature and complexity of data, but the
combination of models can make up for their shortcom-
ings. To this end, researchers can also combine different
types of models, for instance, using the CNN model and
RNN-related variant model to predict image time series,
which can give full play to the advantages of the fusion of
space-time information of CNN and RNN module, extract
relevant variable information, and make it have adaptabil-
ity to complex nonlinear systems in WQ prediction`(Baek
et al. 2020; Tu et al. 2019). In addition to this, recent stud-
ies have proposed new hybrid models such as prediction
models based on wavelet decomposition (Xiao et al. 2017),
variational mode decomposition (Huang et al. 2021), and
empirical mode decomposition (Ma et al. 2020). These
models also have some limitations, such as reduced model
reliability, complex model structure, long training time,
and high computational costs. Therefore, Yu et al. (2022)
also decomposed the original water quality data into mul-
tiple subsequences by using empirical wavelet transform
(EWT), then reorganized the decomposed subsequences
by fuzzy C-means clustering, and finally added the predic-
tion results of the subsequences into the BiGRU prediction
model to obtain the prediction results of water quality.
In practical applications, it is necessary to select appro-
priate models and algorithms according to different data
characteristics and conduct adequate data processing and
preprocessing, to improve the stability and accuracy of
prediction results.
Dealing with missing water quality data is a major chal-
lenge, often due to various human errors or facility issues.
Researchers have explored various approaches, such as
transfer learning, which utilizes existing knowledge to
transition to another similar domain with less data. Instead
of having to train an entirely new model from scratch,
one could use the weights of an already-trained model as
a starting point and fine-tune the model with data from
the new region (Zhuang et al. 2021). Peng et al. (2022)
designed a deep transfer learning model (TLT) based on
the Transformer architecture, introducing a recursive fine-
tuning method. This approach not only transfers knowl-
edge from the source monitoring station to the target sta-
tion but also avoids overfitting the source data during the
pretraining stage. When applied to real datasets, TLT can
effectively enhance long-term prediction accuracy (Tian
et al. 2019). However, its performance may be affected
by differences between the source domain and the target
domain. If there are large differences between the two
domains, the effect of transfer learning may be limited,
resulting in less accuracy of the predicted results. Chen
et al. (2021c) further efforts were made to populate large-
scale continuous missing data by using the TrAdaBoost
LSTM algorithm. However, the data imbalance or label
skew in the replenishment process of this method may lead
to deviation or inaccurate replenishment results.
As mentioned in the review, as shown in Table 4, time
series models have widely used algorithms in water quality
prediction (e.g., LSTM, GRU) and require a large amount
of data input. In the future, for areas where data is lacking
or water quality data is lacking, we need to further study and
apply these issues to improve the accuracy and reliability of
water quality prediction.
Detection of risk substances and toxicity assessment
Water environmental toxicology is a multi-disciplinary field
that studies the behavior, effects, and risks of pollutants in
water environment. It involves ecology, chemistry, molecular
biology, and environmental science. Toxic pollutants dis-
charged into the natural water environment will inevitably
cause harm to the aquatic ecosystem and eventually poison
human beings through the food chain. A thorough under-
standing of water environmental toxicology is essential to
protect ecosystems and safeguard public health. Traditional
toxicity assessment methods are often costly and associated
with uncertainty, but nowadays, high-throughput comput-
ing techniques are increasingly favored because of their
efficient data processing capabilities. QSAR model can pre-
dict the toxicological properties of unknown substances by
associating the structure of chemical substances with toxic
effects. As the amount of data increases, traditional experi-
ence-based QSAR methods become more and more difficult
to deal with when solving complex problems. Therefore,
the ability of DL-QSAR to predict toxicity of pollutants
becomes particularly important (Heo et al. 2019). However,
the structure description of DL-QSAR model reported so
far is still limited to the two-dimensional level. Wang et al.
(2021b) established the SepPCNET model, classified 1317
chemicals by ToxCast and screened environmental estro-
gens. By introducing a novel three-dimensional molecular
surface point cloud with electrostatic potential to describe
the chemical structure, the model was able to identify active
and inactive chemicals with an accuracy of 82.8 and 88.9%,
respectively.
In addition to organic chemistry, nanoparticles are also of
great interest in environmental toxicology. Due to its specific
surface area or photocatalytic activity, it can cause harmful
Table 4  Past research on water quality modeling using DL algorithms
Reference Parameter Data Model Key contribution

Singha et al. (2021) pH, TDS, TH, EWQI, etc 226 groundwater samples DL • DL has excellent processing power compared to
RF other ML methods
XGBoost
Liu et al. (2019) pH, DO, CODMn, conductiv- 912 sets (1 Jan 2016 to 30 Jun 2018) LSTM • The LSTM can handle longer time series problems
ity, turbidity, and ­NH3-N
Zhi et al.(2021) DO 236 sets CAMELS-chem LSTM • The LSTM showed potential for predicting DO in
watersheds where water quality measurements are
not available
Lee and Lee (2018) Algae Temperature, PH, DO, BOD, COD, chlorophyll-α, LSTM • The LSTM was able to solve the problem of
and cyanobacteria weekly interval. Water level and RNN information loss and was superior to predicting
bondage at a daily interval chlorophyll-α better than MLP and RNN
Jiang et al. (2021) pH, temperature, conductivity, 16,800 sets (Oct 21, 2019, to Nov 25, 2019) GRU​ • The GRU was faster at predicting water quality and
and water quantity indicator the learning curve. The results show that the R2
of GRU is higher than RNN and LSTM, and R2 is
higher than the ML linear method
Baek et al. (2020) TN, TP, and TOC Water level, TN, TP, TOC, and weather data CNN-LSTM • Combined CNNs and LSTMs to predict water level
and water quality
Tu et al. (2019) COD 3240 sets (2013 to 2019) CNN-GRU​ • The CNN-GRU was superior to GRU, RNN, and
Interval GRU​ SVR in terms of error and training time
RNN
Huang et al. (2021) DO DO at 10-min intervals DeepAR • The VMD technique was used to extract the fre-
quency features of the original data
Yu et al. (2022) DO, ­NH3-H Water quality data of 3 monitoring stations (Oct 1, EWT-FCM BiGRU​ • Compared with a single BiGRU model, it has better
2017, to Apr 30, 2020) prediction performance
Peng et al. (2022) PH, DO, ­NH3-N, and CODMn 52,800 sets Transfer Learning based • The TLT model can significantly improve the water
on Transformer (TLT) quality prediction accuracy of the Transformer
model model by introducing the TL framework
Zhu et al. (2021b) DO 23,000 sets (May 1, 2017, to May 31, 2019) BiLSTM-Attention • Used a large available data set for an aquatic system
Temperature, pH, turbidity, water conductivity, to predict DO concentration trends in the target
chlorophyll-c, blue-green algae, and DO system
Chen et al. (2021c) DO DO at 4-h intervals (Aug 2018 to Aug 2020) TrAdaBoost-LSTM • Captured long-term dependencies between time
series to fill in large-scale continuous missing data
Tian et al. (2019) Algae 25,000 Temperature, pH, ORP, EC, turbidity, DO, TL-LSTM • The TL has better prediction effect than parameter
and chlorophyll-α at 5-min interval TL-RNN norm
TL-ANN penalties and dropout
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Environmental Science and Pollution Research

effects on aquatic organisms such as oxidative stress and
lipid peroxidation through the production of reactive oxygen
species. Mill et al. (2021) used U-Net and semi-automatic
synthesis data; nanoparticle segmentation of microscopic
images can be achieved with segmentation accuracy com-
parable to manual annotation of toxicologically relevant
metal oxide nanoparticle ensemble. Emerging pollutants
(ECS) include a wide range of man-made chemicals, which
adversely affect the normal functions of homeostasis, repro-
duction and metabolism by disrupting the endocrine system
of animals and humans. Mukherjee et al. (2021) combined
the CNN and LSTM models to play the advantages of the
framework of active learning. The class activation (CAM)
generated from the feature extraction layer is used to predict
the binding affinity and agonistic activity of a given chemi-
cal to the estrogen receptor (ER), and the Grad-CAM is used
to visualize and map the structural alarm and determine the
chemical environment specific to the structural alarm.
In aquatic environmental toxicology, the toxicity
of aquatic animals and plants also needs special atten-
tion. The presence of pollutants can be detected through
photochemical reactions of microalgae species. Pyo et al.
(2022) developed hyperspectral images and a 1D-CNN
regression model for analyzing cyanophyte concentration.
Pyo et al. (2021) used hydrodynamic simulations to predict
in situ cyanobacteria cell concentrations. Due to the opti-
cal complexity of inland waters, these studies are limited to
monitoring the vertical distribution of harmful algal blooms.
Rodrigues et al. (2021) used a model marine diatom (Phaeo-
dactylum tricornutum) as a test organism to assess expo-
sure to different ECs at different doses. The results showed
that the 2D convolutional neural network predicted the type
of EC exposed to the culture with 97.65% accuracy, while
Rocket performed best in predicting the concentration of the
culture with 100% accuracy. In addition to algae, especially
aquatic in vivo models provide information related to the
organism’s complex physiological processes and metabolic
pathways (Dong et al. 2023). Deep learning morphomet-
ric analysis (DLMA) was used to quantitatively identify
8 phenotypic abnormalities of zebrafish larvae, to achieve
classification and segmentation of phenotypic characteris-
tics, and realize efficient hazard identification of chemical

Table 5  Past research on water environmental toxicology using DL algorithms

Reference Model Input data Key contribution

Heo et al. (2019) DL-QSAR Collected from the available literature experi- • The accuracy of DL-QSAR in quantitative analy-
mental datasets assessing qualitative responses sis is above 90%
EDCs
Wang et al. (2021b) SepPCNET 1317 chemicals • The difference in isomer activity was successfully
recognized
Kumar et al. (2021) DNN 3039 compounds • Dnn-based classifiers have the highest accuracy
in predicting the mutagenicity of compounds
Shen et al. (2021) DNN 1056 pesticides • The accuracy of DNN and RF methods in
RF screening potential ER agonists exceeded 63%,
respectively
Rodrigues et al. (2021) 2D CNN Phaeodactylum tricornutum • The 2D CNN was 97.65% accurate in predicting
Rocket the type of EC to which the culture was exposed,
and Rocket performed best in predicting the
concentration the culture was subjected to with
100% accuracy
Mukherjee et al. (2021) CNN-LSTM 7812 sets • In combination with CNN and LSTM, the Grad-
Chemical for the estrogen receptor CAM generated from the feature extraction layer
visualizes key structures
Hu et al. (2020) CNN QSAR prediction • Proposed QSAR prediction by the concatenation
of end-to-end encoder-decoder model and CNN
architecture
Mill et al. (2021) U-Net Two different diameters and food grade ­TiO2 • CNNS were trained to accurately segment nano-
nanoparticles particles in microscope images
Pyo et al. (2021) CNN Investigate specific algal (from 2015 to 2018) • The EFDC-NIER model was used to calibrate the
EFDC-NIER water quality synthesis data
Pyo et al. (2022) 1D-CNN Chlorophyll-a, phycocyanin, lutein, fucoxanthin, • The 1D-CNN model used quantitative and evalu-
zeaxanthin (from 2019 to 2020) ative analysis of algal phenomena
Dong et al. (2023) TensorMask 870 zebrafish larvae images • The DL model was used to quantitatively identify
Mask R-CNN (open-source image data) in vivo toxicity screening of zebrafish larvae
Green et al. (2021) GAN-ZT 1003 unique ToxCast chemicals • The combination of Go-ZT and GAN-ZT was
Go-ZT best for predicting toxicity of untested compounds

substances and environmental pollutants. By combining
high-throughput screening data with the DL method, Green
et al. (2021) combined Go-ZT and GAN-ZT to predict the
toxicity of untested chemicals, providing an efficient way to
screen 85,000 environmental chemicals.
As shown in Table 5, the application of DL to the detec-
tion of water-characteristic risk substances and toxicity
assessment has been widely successful (e.g., CNN). How-
ever, this method also has some limitations, such as high
consumption of computing resources, poor interpretation,
and limited adaptability. To overcome these limitations, we
anticipate additional efforts in the future, including improv-
ing network structure and training strategies, providing bet-
ter interpretability, and improving model robustness and
generalization to adapt to different imaging conditions and
complex backgrounds. In addition, other DL methods, such
as GAN and Transformer, can be explored to further improve
the performance of water signature risk substance detection
and toxicity assessment.
Water pollution treatment
Neural networks (NNs) have been used in modern waste-
water treatment facilities to help simulate water quality and
equipment operating conditions. However, previous stud-
ies have mainly focused on the characterization of sludge
bulking behavior and evolution during the activated sludge
process, and have not provided a definitive solution. With
the introduction of a time series DL algorithm (e.g., LSTM),
its good effectiveness has been proved (Farhi et al. 2021).
As shown in Table 6, COD is the parameter that is studied
most frequently in the process of monitoring sewage, and
it is also a key indicator for evaluating the effect of sewage
treatment. Secondly, SS, BOD, and other parameters have a
close relationship with COD (Guang et al. 2019), which are
not only affected by time series but also related to spatial
distribution. To better understand the data, the model, the
selection of the best input features, and to discover the key
factors in this specific domain, Alvi et al. (2022b) investi-
gated the relative importance of each input feature to predic-
tive modeling problems through feature importance via input
suppression, but it failed to adequately consider the interac-
tions between variables. Zhang et al. (2023) take a more
advanced perspective by using interpretable artificial intelli-
gence (XAI) methods such as SHAP to take into account the
interactions between the 12 input metrics when quantifying
their contributions. To converge the model faster and bet-
ter, researchers try to build a hybrid neural network predic-
tion model to improve the prediction performance (Wang
et al. 2021a). For instance, Wang et al. (2019b) used the
CNN-LSTM mixed model to dynamically predict the COD
of wastewater treatment effluent, and found that the error
of the direct prediction method of COD mass flow rate was
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
smaller than that of the indirect prediction method, which
predicted the COD amount according to the sewage flow rate
and COD concentration. Li et al. (2021b) also showed that
the model combining CNN and LSTM was superior to the
model using the two networks alone in terms of accuracy
and prediction ability.
In wastewater plant inspection, the main challenge of
influent measurements in fault detection is the nonlinearity
of the interference they are subjected to. Among them, the
AE model has received extensive attention because of its
data coordination ability to adapt to the nonlinear relation-
ship and dynamics of the data. The researchers improved
on the AE, and these models were particularly effective in
dealing with noisy data. For instance, Ba-Alawi et al. (2021)
established a stacked autoencoder as SDAE as a denoising
device, although the denoising method is mainly aimed at
extracting good and useful features from input data. It natu-
rally extends to the interpolation of missing data, and Abiri
et al. (2019) investigated the use of denoising autoencoders
for single interpolation of missing data to overcome lim-
ited data challenges. Due to the high cost of sensors and
the frequency and delay of sampling and laboratory analy-
sis, wastewater treatment process data may be sparse, and
transfer learning can be used as an alternative solution to
deal with data scarcity. For instance, Alvi et al. (2022a) used
autoencoders to systematically enhance the target domain
data so that the synthetic samples generated by them closely
track the target domain distribution to improve the trans-
fer learning performance of the task. However, data-driven
multi-layer models take too long to train due to heavy com-
putation. To overcome this problem, Safder et al. (2022)
used extreme learning machine (ELM) technology to adjust
the weight of SAE in the training plan. The deep confidence
network technology is applied to the feature space extracted
by ELM to classify the current state of the secondary clari-
fier and improve the operation and performance of the waste-
water treatment plant through fast training time, generaliza-
tion ability, and classification ability.
In wastewater plant inspection, the main challenge of
influent measurements in fault detection is the nonlinearity
of the interference they are subjected to. Among them, the
AE model has received extensive attention because of its
data coordination ability to adapt to the nonlinear relation-
ship and dynamics of the data. The researchers improved
on the AE, and these models were particularly effective in
dealing with noisy data. For instance, Ba-Alawi et al. (2021)
established a stacked autoencoder as SDAE as a denoising
device, although the denoising method is manly aimed at
extracting good and useful features from input data. It natu-
rally extends to the interpolation of missing data, and Abiri
et al. (2019) investigated the use of denoising autoencoders
for single interpolation of missing data to overcome lim-
ited data challenges. Due to the high cost of sensors and
Table 6  Past research on WWTP WQ prediction using DL algorithms
Reference Parameter Model Input data Key contribution

Farhi et al. (2021) Ammonia and nutrients LSTM Climate data, ammonia, nitrate, flow rates, rotors’ water • The effluent concentration of ammonia ­NH4+ and nitrate
level depth, oxygen, and turbidity ­NO3- can be predicted several hours in advance
Alvi et al. (2022b) Ammonium and nitrate GRUconv 25,812 samples • The GRUconv model enabled performance gain up to 37%
DO, pH, temperature, TSS turbidity, and nutrient concentra- in RMSE over the closest competitor
tions (Jul 25, 2020, to Jul 7, 2021)
Safder et al. (2022) SVI ELM-SAE-DBN 1040 samples • The modle outperformed existing state-of-the-art methods
COD, BOD, DO, influent flow, MLSS, cyanide in the SVI modeling task by 38 to 78%
Alvi et al. (2022a) Nitrite and ammonia AETL 58,464 samples • The proposed method used AE to systematically enhance
pH, temperature, and DO at 15-min intervals the target domain data to improve the TL performance of
Environmental Science and Pollution Research

the task
Wang et al. (2019b) COD CNN-LSTM Wastewater temperature, pH, AN, sewage inflow, influent • The hybrid CNN-LSTM prediction model had higher accu-
COD, and effluent COD at 1-min intervals racy and better prediction performance than the stand-alone
CNN or LSTM model
Li et al. (2021b) COD and SS CNN-LSTM-Attention Influent COD and SS, flowrate, PH, temperature, DO, efflu- • A hybrid CNN-LSTM-Attention model performed the best
ent COD, and SS in COD and SS forecasting
Zhang et al. (2023) COD, TN, and TP LSTM tenWQIs (e.g., COD, TN, TP, pH, ­NH3-N, SS, T, σ, TU, • The GSA based on SHAP was performed to identify the
DO, HACH, USA) and five meteorological indicators input variables contributing significantly to detection
targets
Guang et al. (2019) COD Bi-LSTM Feed rate, aeration, effluent BOD, nitrate, SS, and COD • The LSTM has good performance in solving the soft meas-
LSTM urement problem of COD
Niu et al. (2020) COD and SS GA-DBN Feedrate, pH, temperature, DO, influent COD, and SS • The GA-DBN demonstrated lower errors with higher fitting
than DBN and BPNN
Wang et al. (2021a) Nutrients DBN-EL ORP, DO, influent TP, effluent TP, • The parameters update the weights only when positive
NH4, pH, TSS, nitrate, and temperature events are triggered, and a DBNEL convergence analysis
based on Markov process optimization is proposed
Ba-Alawi et al. (2021) COD, TP, TN, and SS SDAE 720 samples • The SDAE-based fault detection performance was superior
COD, TP, TN, PH, Temperature, turbidity, and SS to conventional methods with a detection rate of 98%
Dairi et al. (2019) Influent conditions RNN-RBM Influent conditions datas (September 1, 2010 to May 14, • The area under the curve of OCSVM based on RNN-
2011) RBM was as high as 0.98, which was superior to all other
scenarios
Pang et al. (2019) COD, TP, and N
­ H4+-N ASM2d-QL COD, TP, ­NH4+-N, and MLSS • The algorithm provided successful intelligent modeling and
stable optimal control strategies under fluctuating influent
loads
Chen et al. (2021b) DO and Chemical dosage MADRL 10,000 sample data • The model has a high Q value for influents with appropriate
control variables, learning abstract features from high-
dimensional states
Niu et al. (2022) Energy consumption (EC) DBN-DMOALO-PI SO5, ­SNO2, ­TSSinf, ­BOD5, ­CODinf, ­TNinf, ­SNHinf • The problem that the objective function can overcome the
and effluent quality (EQ) dynamic characteristics of process data was solved
Ma et al. (2020) BOD DMF-DNN 32,323 sets • The DMF-DNN can solve sparse matrix problems more
Temperature,pH, and DO intelligently

the frequency and delay of sampling and laboratory analy-
sis, wastewater treatment process data may be sparse, and
transfer learning can be used as an alternative solution to
deal with data scarcity. For instance, Alvi et al. (2022a) used
autoencoders to systematically enhance the target domain
data so that the synthetic samples generated by them closely
track the target domain distribution to improve the trans-
fer learning performance of the task. However, data-driven
multi-layer models take too long to train due to heavy com-
putation. To overcome this problem, Safder et al. (2022)
used ELM technology to adjust the weight of SAE in the
training plan. The deep confidence network technology is
applied to the feature space extracted by ELM to classify
the current state of the secondary clarifier and improve the
operation and performance of the wastewater treatment plant
through fast training time, generalization ability, and clas-
sification ability.
Overall, the core paradigm of water pollution control is
shifting from pollutant removal to resource and energy uti-
lization. Regarding the calculation and control of energy
consumption in sewage treatment plants, Long et al. (2016)
showed that a single key performance indicator (KPI) could
not be applied universally. Therefore, Oulebsir et al. (2018)
proposed a method for multi-wastewater treatment plant
daily time steps based on different KPls. Hernandez-del-
Olmo et al. (2016) pointed out that reinforcement learning
(RL) can better control the DO set points of proportional
integration (PI) controllers that consider system state vari-
ables such as ammonium and DO concentrations, compared
with manually operated and ammonium-based PI control-
lers. Other studies test and apply RL methods of Q-based
learning. For example, Syafiie et al. (2011) used a Fen-
ton reagent to control the advanced oxidation process of
phenolic substances in a laboratory factory and used the
RL method to optimize the use of a Fenton reagent, thus
improving the efficiency of the advanced oxidation process.
Pang et al. (2019) optimized the hydraulic residence time
of anaerobic and aerobic reactors with the RL method to
achieve a more efficient wastewater treatment process. In
addition to traditional RL, DRL is obtained by combining
DL and RL to deal with complex control problems. Chen
et al. (2021b) used the multi-drug deep deterministic pol-
icy gradient (DDPG) method. Control of DO and chemical
doses in wastewater treatment plants in continuous action
and state space. In this approach, they tested various reward
functions to develop sustainable control strategies. The DRL
approach is considered to be better able to deal with the
complexity and uncertainty of the system. To better deal
with changes in wastewater composition during wastewa-
ter treatment, Dairi et al. (2019) proposed an RNN-RBM-
based OCSVM model for data-driven anomaly detection.
In addition, Niu et al. (2022) also proposed a dynamic opti-
mization control method based on multi-objective Antlion
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
optimization, which can achieve simultaneous optimization
of energy consumption and effluent quality, thus effectively
reducing the cost of the wastewater treatment process and
achieving carbon neutrality. At the same time, digital twin
technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality
are also applied in wastewater treatment, using cutting-edge
deep learning technology to achieve real-time simulation and
synchronous control, to break through the technical prob-
lems of directional transfer and transformation of pollutants
in water bodies. NN is widely used in wastewater treatment,
and emerging technologies and the combination of DL and
bioinformatics offer more possibilities and efficiencies for
wastewater treatment systems. However, how to improve
the accuracy and interpretability of information mining and
analysis is still the main problem at present.
Application of deep learning in water ecosystem
Water body detection and aquatic species identification,
as well as wetland monitoring protection, are essential to
ensure the health of watershed ecosystems. Deep learning is
gaining increasing attention in this area, both from a group
and individual-level perspective. In this section, therefore,
we discuss research using deep learning in this area, which
we summarize in Table 7.
Identification of aquatic ecological species
The underwater environment is complicated, so it takes a
lot of manpower and material resources to obtain the under-
water paired images. With the development of IoT devices,
e.g., cameras and drones, large amounts of underwater image
data can be collected for the identification and classification
of animals and aquatic plants (Gray et al. 2019; Mittal et al.
2022). Traditional methods such as PCA and SVM are often
used to extract features from aquatic animal images for target
recognition and detection (Olden et al. 2008). However, due
to the high heterogeneity of the water environment and the
similarity of aquatic species, it is difficult to distinguish dif-
ferent aquatic organisms by external characteristics, which
poses certain challenges for the body type recognition and
detection of aquatic objects. Researchers have begun to use
DL for high-resolution remote sensing image feature classi-
fication and change detection (Krizhevsky et al. 2017; Song
et al. 2020), e.g., VGGNet (Muhammad et al. 2018), FCN
(Schuegraf and Bittner 2019), ResNet (Zhu et al. 2021a), and
U-NET (Sharma et al. 2018). Compared with the ML clas-
sification method, it can more effectively adaptively learn
recognition features from images through supervised learn-
ing (Shi et al. 2021). Water bodies are habitats for many
biological species, and water extraction helps identify sites
where bathymetric species may exist. Li et al. (2019a) used
the FCN model to extract water bodies from high-resolution
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
remote sensing images of GF-2 under limited training sam-
ples. The results are significantly better than NDWI, SVM,
and SM models. Due to the changing interference caused by
multiple imaging conditions and complex land backgrounds,
Zhang et al. (2021) proposed the cascaded fully convolu-
tional network (CFCN) to improve the performance of water
body detection in high-resolution SAR images. Furthermore,
Wang et al. (2020b) used ResNet as an encoder to obtain
advanced feature information of the input image. Moreover,
the features are abstracted by residual convolution, and dif-
ferent levels of features are fused. Finally, a higher precision
lake water body extraction map is obtained. The proposal
of DL improved network performance, but this led to the
consumption of computing resources and the complexity
of neural network structures. Therefore, researchers built
lightweight DNNS by using reverse residual structures to
enhance gradient propagation, which first increased the
dimension and then decreased the dimension to reduce the
number of parameters and computational complexity while
maintaining high image classification accuracy(Wang et al.
2021d).
For the poor quality of underwater images, DL solved
these problems by enhancing the generalization ability
through data enhancement and achieving higher target
detection accuracy (Capinha et al. 2021; Christin et al. 2019;
Deep et al. 2019). Zhang et al. (2020) proposed a stochastic
gradient descent (SGD) preprocessing algorithm to improve
the pixel quality and detection accuracy of images. Not all
images can be preprocessed to improve their detection qual-
ity, so some researchers try to get better detection results
by improving the model. For instance, Yang et al. (2023b)
found that TL combined with multiple CNNs could effec-
tively identify algal cell images and harmful phytoplank-
ton. The results showed that the recall rate reached 98.0%,
which confirmed the significant role of TL in improving the
identification performance of harmful phytoplankton. Wang
et al. (2021c) proposed an underwater image enhancement
network (UIE-Net) based on CNN. The UIE-Ne network is
mainly composed of two subnetworks, namely color correc-
tion networks (CC-Net) and contrast enhancement networks
(CE-Net). The convergence speed of the network is signifi-
cantly improved by using the pixel interrupt strategy, and the
color correction and fog removal of underwater images are
realized by unified training. In addition, a region-based CNN
is proposed to detect fish moving freely in an unconstrained
underwater environment and to solve the difficult problem of
fish identification through the auxiliary recognition method.
Because underwater images are affected by wavelength-
dependent light absorption and scattering, there will be
serious color distortion and detail loss, which will seriously
affect the detection and recognition of underwater objects.
The emergence of GAN can solve this problem to some
extent. The existing extended GAN-based image dataset
not only expands the number of images but also improves
the accuracy of recognition(Li et al. 2018; Wang et al.
2023). The continuous optimization of the DL algorithm
improves the stability of the algorithm, and to a certain
extent improves the search for real images from underwater.
However, these methods ignore the diversity of underwater
conditions. Wang et al. (2020a) proposed an attention-gen-
erating adversarial network (CA-GAN) model to enhance
underwater images by creating a many-to-one mapping func-
tion based on the attention mechanism. For problems such
as complex numbers of organisms and biomass estimation,
the experimental verification by Fabbri et al. (2018) proved
that Cycle GAN is effective in underwater image enhance-
ment tasks and solves the problem that the model needs to be
trained on paired data. In recent years, the Cycle GAN has
been widely used in underwater image preprocessing tasks.
Based on Cycle GAN, Han et al. (2020) proposed an end-to-
end spiral generative adversarial network (Spira-GAN) for
underwater image enhancement tasks to restore underwater
images. The model has several convolution-deconvolution
block generators that can retain more meaningful detail in
the original underwater image. At the same time, a pixel-
level loss function composed of mean square error and angle
error is used to train the model stably to overcome the prob-
lem of overexposure and avoid color distortion.
This section mainly summarizes the research status of
deep learning in the field of aquatic animal identification
and detection. Although DL has achieved good results, in
the actual situation, the adaptability and robustness of these
methods still have a great lack. A priori-driven underwater
image enhancement model requires specific domain knowl-
edge and can be invalidated when the assumptions do not
match the actual scenario. On the other hand, for pure data-
driven deep learning methods, the performance of the net-
work is closely related to the quality and quantity of training
data. Due to the complete reliance on data, when the domain
gap between the training image and the test image is large,
the model will fail on the image with different color skew-
ness and turbidity. Most of these studies have not considered
the problems, which are the challenges faced by DL methods
in the identification and detection of aquatic animals and are
also the future research direction.
Overall management of wetland ecology
In the late 1970s, the concept of “ecosystem health” emerged
internationally, which is a new goal of environmental manage-
ment and ecosystem management. Human activity affects all
ecosystems and their changes, and we believe that DL tools
are an appropriate way to achieve these goals. For instance,
DL tools can be applied to monitoring and assessment of
ecosystem restoration and restoration processes to under-
stand the ecological functions and effects of restoration of
Table 7  Past research on water ecosystem using DL algorithms
Reference Application Model Input Data Key contribution

Li et al. (2019b) Water body extraction FCN 10,000 VHR images • Introduced a flexible one-to-one convolution layer
Wang et al. (2020b) Water body extraction MSLWENet 6774 images • By using residual convolution to extract features, the
overall accuracy of the model is up to 98.53%
Wang et al. (2021d) Water body extraction MobileNetV2 GF-2, WorldView-2, and UAV orthoimages • The water extraction accuracy of MobileNetV2
model is the highest
Zhang et al. (2021) Water body detection CFCN 12,796 image patches • A new variable focal loss (VFL) function was pro-
posed and a frequency-dependent factor was used to
replace the constant weight factor of focal loss
Zhang et al. (2021) Sea cucumber detection SGD 120 underwater images of sea cucumbers • SGD effectively acquired image features to extend
the accuracy of sea cucumber detection
Chen et al. (2023a) Aquatic monitoring YOLOv5s6 + DA 3307 images • The combined F1 of YOLOv5s6 model and data
augmentation (DA) can reach 96.84%
Yang et al. (2023b) Aquatic ecological monitoring CNN-TL 7859 phytoplankton images • Compared with the model without fine-tuning, the
average accuracy of the CNN-TL model for auto-
matic recognition of harmful phytoplankton images
is improved by 11.9%
Wang et al. (2021c) Underwater image enhancement UIE-Net 200 images from the NUS-8 data • Proposed two parallel subnetworks CC-Net and CE-
Net to generate pixel-wise color cast and transmis-
sion map to enhance underwater images
Li et al. (2018) Underwater image color correction GAN 3800 underwater images and 3800 air images • The first attempted that correct the color casts of
underwater images by weakly supervised learning
Wang et al. (2023) Underwater image enhancement SA-GAN 1000 real underwater images • Enhance underwater images by referencing paired
raw and high-quality natural images
Wang et al. (2020a) Underwater image enhancement CA-GAN 70,000 pairs images • The concurrent channel and spatial attention feature
fusion module were introduced to recalibrate the
front-end feature map and the back end feature map
generated by the decoder layer
Fabbri et al. (2018) Underwater image enhancement Cycle GAN 1000 collected real underwater images • Improved the quality of visual underwater scenes
and restored underwater images to generate data sets
Han et al. (2020) Underwater image enhancement Spiral-GAN URPC Dataset, EUVP Dataset, RUIE Dataset, • Proposed spiral training strategy can implicitly
Underwater-Mot Dataset increase the training data, allowing the models to
learn a more complex mapping
DeLancey et al. (2020a) Wetland CNN Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, ALOS, and DEM (2017 to • The CNN-generated wetland product proved to be
classification 2018) more accurate than the XGBoost wetland product
by 5%
Hosseiny et al. (2022) Wetland classification WetNet Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 (GEE) • WetNet that accuracy and processing time better
than other DL approaches
Du et al. (2020) Forested wetland classification U-Net WorldView-3 (WV3), lidar, DEM, TWI • The integration of topographic metrics in DL model
can improve the classification accuracy for depres-
sional wetlands
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
 Environmental Science and Pollution Research

restored ecosystems. As shown in Table 7, we can use the

• Predictions, which recall rate of 91% and accuracy

combination of Sentinel-1, and Sentinel-2, radar data, aerial

• The Nadam optimizer improved accuracy to more

• The Adam optimizer was used to train the model,

than 96% and reduced data loss to less than 0.12

and the feature extractor was combined with the

images, and satellite images to carry out large-scale monitor-
ing and assessment of wetlands, including wetland delinea-
tion, wetland vegetation types, and surface water dynamics.
DeLancey et al. (2020b) evaluated the effectiveness of CNNS
times that of the benchmark model
in wetland area classification. Compared with traditional ML,
• DeepNets performed wetland

CNN improves the discriminant ability of wetland classifi-

Swin Transformer classifier

cation by more than 10%. Hosseiny et al. (2022) proposed
the WetNet model, which was composed of three different
submodels, including several cyclic layers and convolution
Key contribution

layers, to improve the monitoring classification and perfor-

rate of 57%

mance of wetlands. Faced with the low availability of wetland

reference data for large-scale wetland monitoring, Jamali et al.
(2022) proposed to combine GAN and CNN into a new model
3DUNetGSFormer, using 3D GAN networks to generate syn-
thetic Sentinel-1/2 data for classes with limited training data.
Sentinel-2, ALOS-DEM, and NOAA-DEM images

Then, the real and synthetic data are passed to CNN, and the
results show that the accuracy and F1 of the model are greatly
improved compared with the use of real data.
The semantic segmentation method divides the coastal
and wetland land cover areas of each superimposed feature
on remote sensing images into separate layers. O'Neil et al.
(2020) used deep learning architecture DeepNets of remote
sensing data and input dataset composed of high-resolution
LiDAR DEM, NAIP

3DUNetGSFormer Sentinel-1/2 (GEE)

terrain index and normalized differential vegetation index for

wetland semantic segmentation. The results show that the
model can achieve high precision in training and evaluating
Input Data

a single site. In addition, models trained across multiple sites

can achieve similar accuracy. In addition, in the face of thou-
sands of slight forest undulations, wetlands often occur when
the forest canopy is submerged. Du et al. (2020) used the most
advanced U-NET semantic segmentation deep neural network
to map the submerged area of forest wetlands. They used
DeepNets

BiSeNet
Model

LiDAR intensity images to infer the inundation of wetlands.

By adding terrain information to the pixel-based random forest
output, the overall accuracy is slightly improved. Pham et al.
(2022) developed BiSeNet, an advanced U-structured neural
network that analyzes spatial and contextual information in two
stages, allowing it to interpret 13 ecosystems in the estuarine
Wetland identification

Ecological succession

region from images in less than 1 min. In addition to map-

ping species and areas of high value to ecosystems and con-
Wetland mapping

servation, DL can also be used to track the impact of human

Application

activities on ecosystems. For instance, YOLO combined data

enhancement techniques to monitor the effects of indirect fac-
tors such as temperature changes and wastewater discharge on
river ecosystems with greater efficiency and accuracy, and such
integrated algorithms in turn more effectively track changes
Table 7  (continued)

O'Neil et al. (2020)

Jamali et al. (2022)

Pham et al. (2022)

in plankton populations (Chen et al. 2023b). DL can also use

tracking information from industrial fishing vessels to map the
fishery’s footprint. This classification was essential for measur-
Reference

ing the health and quality of water bodies and for protecting
endangered species (Mittal et al. 2022).
 Environmental Science and Pollution Research

Going one step further, we envision automated sensors
that use deep learning to manage water ecosystems, which
can continuously manage water ecosystems without much
human intervention. In addition, it can also help decision-
makers make policy or management decisions about assess-
ment services, which is expected to break through the con-
struction and overall management technology system of
green watersheds.
Discuss and suggestions
The above review lists the representative applications of DL
in the field of water science. Most importantly, the scope of
this review paper is extended to as many application types as
possible, including the elaboration of water environmental
resource management, water environmental protection, and
water ecological basin optimization management. To better
use DL in water-related research, we compare and analyze
the advantages and disadvantages of these DL algorithms in
different research directions, and put forward suggestions for
algorithm selection according to the applicability of algo-
rithms to different scenarios. The results are briefly shown
in Table 8.
In general, supervised learning usually requires a large
amount of labeled data to train the model. RNN correlation
model is the most widely used algorithm in the process-
ing of prediction tasks, but there are still problems such as
long training time and slow convergence speed. Because the
data in many fields of water-related research are time series
numbers, LSTM and GRU make up for these shortcomings
of RNN and can better solve the tasks with a large amount
of data. For image recognition and classification tasks, CNN
can be better used for visual processing. In these tasks, there
may be some unlabeled data that can be used as part of
semi-supervised learning to improve the performance of the
model. However, a common problem with NN algorithms
is that they are often black-box and lack interpretability. In
contrast, Gans do not require explicit labeled data and labels.
It generates and recognizes data by training generative and
recognizer models in adversarial learning. Therefore, Gans
are very useful when dealing with image distortion tasks that
have well-defined features and need to generate understand-
able rules. In addition, reinforcement learning (DRL) can
address issues such as long-term planning, maintenance, and
management, addressing optimal decision-making. In the
field of water science, there are other algorithms and models
such as Transformer and DBN. They offer different ways to
solve various problems. According to the specific research
task and data characteristics, it is very important to choose
the appropriate algorithm and model.
Future research challenges
DL algorithm application optimization
DL has gradually penetrated the field of water pollution
treatment research, and many papers have accomplished
the same task with almost the same methods and different

Table 8  Recommendations on the selection of DL algorithm in different research directions of water science
Means Applications Algorithm recom- Data requirement Algorithm character- Applicable conditions
mended istics

Supervised learning Water demand fore- LSTM, RNN, GRU​ Historical demand Long-time memory; Data of time series
casting data, Rainfall data, complex structure,
Predicting water observed flow, and black box, calcula-
quality water depth data tion burden
Flood forecasting
Runoff forecasting
Supervised or semi- Flood prediction and CNN, U-NET (e.g., Urban catchment data, Automatic feature The sample is pre-
supervised learning monitoring R-CNNs and YOLO) flow, CCTV video extraction sented in the form
Leakage detection and of images
location
Detection of risk sub-
stances and toxicity
assessment
Reinforcement learn- Water pollution treat- DRL Demand data, system Better generalization As mentioned above
ing ment technology state variables performance
Unsupervised learning Aquatic identification GAN LiDAR data, satellite Adversarial training, Data with a small
and detection data, and radar generator and dis- volume
criminator network
structure, zero-sum
game, loss function
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
data. Scholars should optimize the deep learning model
with existing focus length, to reduce training parameters,
improve running speed improving classification effect, etc.,
and develop more general algorithms and models accord-
ing to water treatment and management requirements. For
example, the standard convolution is replaced by separable
convolution, which can reduce the number of model param-
eters and improve the calculation speed of the model (Hu
et al. 2019). By adding additional features to the model to
improve the classification recognition effect (Cruz et al.
2017),transfer learning and capsule network (CapsNet) make
up for the loss of spatial information (Sabour et al. 2017),
and better solve the two defects of CNN’s low recognition
ability between objects (Wang et al. 2019a).
Black box effect and algorithm interpretability
DL technology can sense, learn, act, and even make deci-
sions autonomically. However, the effectiveness of the
technology is mainly limited by the inability to explain the
rationality of its analysis and decision to users, evaluate the
advantages and disadvantages of its model, and predict its
universality in new tasks. It is not even secure for future
applications.
Interpretability of deep neural networks, especially in
the form of “black box” models, refers to the ability to
understand and explain the reasoning behind their predic-
tions or decisions. Deep neural networks are often consid-
ered black box models because their internal operations
and complex architectures make it challenging to inter-
pret their decision-making process. While interpretability
remains a significant challenge for deep neural networks,
researchers have developed several techniques to shed
light on their behavior. Here are some approaches used to
enhance interpretability:
Feature importance: By analyzing the importance of input
features in the network’s decision-making process, it is pos-
sible to gain insights into which features are most influential.
Techniques such as feature visualization and saliency map-
ping can help highlight the regions or attributes of the input
that contribute most significantly to the output.
Layer visualization: Deep neural networks consist of mul-
tiple layers, and visualizing the activations of each layer can
provide insights into the representations learned at different
levels of abstraction. Techniques like activation maximi-
zation and deconvolutional networks allow researchers to
generate visualizations that reveal the features learned by
the network.
Grad-CAM: Gradient-weighted class activation mapping
(Grad-CAM) is a technique that highlights the regions of
an input image that contribute the most to a specific class
prediction. By analyzing the gradients flowing into the
final convolutional layer, Grad-CAM generates a heatmap
indicating the importance of each spatial location. On this
basis, Jalwana et al. (2021) introduced camera to calculate
accurate significance maps using gradient backpropagation
strategies, avoiding problems with external factors such as
heuristics, priors, and thresholds, allowing for better inter-
pretation of depth vision model predictions.
Model distillation: Distillation is a process of training
a smaller, more interpretable model to mimic the behavior
of a larger, complex model. By transferring knowledge
from the black box model to the smaller model, the result-
ing model can be more interpretable while maintaining
similar performance.
Rule extraction: Rule extraction methods aim to extract
human-understandable rules or decision trees that mimic
the behavior of the deep neural network. These rules pro-
vide explanations for the model’s predictions by explicitly
stating the conditions under which specific outcomes are
predicted. Layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP): LRP
is a technique that aims to attribute the prediction of a
deep neural network to the input features by redistribut-
ing the prediction score back to the input. LRP assigns
relevance values to each input feature, highlighting their
contribution to the final prediction.
Network dissection: Network dissection involves ana-
lyzing the responses of intermediate network layers to
identify if they correspond to specific semantic concepts
or object classes. This technique provides insights into the
interpretability of deep neural networks by revealing the
types of concepts the network has learned.
SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) is a game
theory-based method that assigns a “fair” value to each
feature, and the SHAP method supports both global anal-
ysis of estimates and local analysis of detailed instances.
Wang et al. (2022) used the shap-additive interpretation
method to explain the output of the DL model to under-
stand the effect of the upstream of a river on the estuarine.
The XAI method showed that the SHAP method was help-
ful to understand the direction and extent of the influence
of input covariates on the estuarine water quality. It can
also be used to quantify the contribution of various char-
acteristics (e.g., rainfall, soil moisture, and temperature)
to the prediction of water flow or level.
Local interpretable model-agnostic explanations
(LIME): It is an algorithm that provides local explana-
tions for complex models by locally approximating them
with interpretable models. It modifies individual data
samples by adjusting the eigenvalues and analyzes their
impact on the output. It acts as an “interpreter,” interpret-
ing the predictions of each data sample.
It is suggested that in the future, many researches
on model interpretability should be accelerated, such
as the breakthrough of Sobol sensitivity analysis, SHP
value calculation, and other new technologies, and the

development of AI system construction theory and eval-
uation methods for water and environment should be
accelerated.
Data validity and standardization
For most countries and regions, basic data such as water
quantity and quality of urban water treatment systems gen-
erally rely on manual recording, and the data immediacy
and effectiveness are poor. However, the migration and
transformation process of pollutants in the water system
changes rapidly, and it is difficult to feedback on the imme-
diate situation of the water system only by relying on man-
ually recorded data. If the DL algorithm is trained on this
basis, the result will inevitably have a huge deviation from
the real situation, resulting in poor prediction performance.
At the algorithmic level, the traditional DL model is
limited by the insufficient amount of data and cannot
effectively capture the dynamic changes of pollutants in
the water system. Therefore, transfer learning technol-
ogy provides a feasible solution to solve the problem of
limited data. We can adopt transfer learning to alleviate
the problem of insufficient samples, which is still in its
infancy. Recently, Alvi et al. (2022a) proposed the autoen-
coder transfer learning (AETL) method, which used a deep
model to expand the limited target domain data. Further,
by using Markov chain processes and random walks to
enhance the actual data of the task, simulated data gen-
eration can produce training samples that are close to the
actual situation, and fine-tune the limited actual data at a
later stage to improve the accuracy and generalization abil-
ity of the model prediction (Alvi et al. 2023b). In terms of
hardware facilities, the long-term development needs of
urban water treatment systems have promoted the devel-
opment of online monitoring and sensing technology. In
the future, we will further strengthen the construction
and development of online data monitoring and sensing
technologies in the field of water and environment, and
implement the standardization of data quality, interfaces,
and protocols. At the same time, at the data management
level, the standard dataset similar to ImageNet (http://​www.​
image-​net.​org/) in the field of machine learning is further
developed, and the existing datasets such as CAMELS are
extended. Building a database of water quality, hydrologi-
cal, and meteorological data with consistent data sources,
uniform format, high quality, and different regions and
periods can provide researchers with adequate data sup-
port. In addition, strengthening the culture and institutions
of data sharing can encourage all participants to contribute
and use these valuable resources, thus forming a mutually
beneficial data ecosystem.
In short, only through the comprehensive improvement
of algorithm innovation, hardware improvement, and data
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
management can we break through the constraints of the
relatively small amount of available data in water systems
and develop and apply DL algorithms based on small data
under the premise that there are still differences in the
development level, human, and material input of different
countries and regions. Finally, more accurate and reliable
forecasting and management of urban water treatment sys-
tems can be achieved.
Digital twins and autonomous systems
A digital twin is the creation of a virtual copy of a physical
entity in the real world through a digital model, which is
used to understand, learn, and predict the behavior of the
physical system. By integrating multi-disciplinary, multi-
physical, and multi-scale information, digital twins can sim-
ulate complex problems such as river basins, hydrological
cycles, and water quality transmission. It presents engineer-
ing health data and predicts changes in physical systems.
Digital twins can predict floods and droughts in advance,
develop effective flood control and drought relief plans, and
optimize water resource regulation. Through the intelligent
application platform, the digital twin technology can simu-
late and preview flood control and regulation schemes; real-
ize the coordinated scheduling of hydrology, water conserv-
ancy, and environment; and improve the management and
operation capacity of river basin water resources. However,
digital twins face challenges such as data acquisition and
quality, complexity and multi-scale issues, model accuracy
and predictive power, system security and privacy, and tech-
nology integration and application implementation. Most
of the existing research is based on physical models, and
few focus on integrating DL components. To fully lever-
age the potential of digital twins, future advances in deep
learning applications will likely combine CNN and LSTM
networks to understand and predict system behavior, and
use DRL to determine the best interventions. The analysis
and decision-making system of the whole process of the
water cycle from meteorological rainfall to surface runoff
production to confluence to river course evolution is con-
structed. Only by overcoming these challenges can digital
twins truly realize their value in the field of water science,
providing innovative solutions for water management and
conservation.
The interdisciplinarity and human dynamic
challenge
In addition, researchers, engineers, and managers with
backgrounds in disciplines related to water science often
do not have relevant knowledge and technical experience in
the field of artificial intelligence, which leads to the prac-
tical value of artificial intelligence technology is not fully
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
utilized. To give full play to the advantages of interdisci-
plinary disciplines, it is necessary to cultivate interdiscipli-
nary talents with knowledge in different fields. These talents
will combine water science and deep learning techniques to
develop more advanced technologies and apply them to real
engineering practices. This will help solve some problems
that cannot be solved by existing methods, provide more
effective solutions, and create more efficient and sustainable
management methods in the water environment sector.
Emerging AI tools
With the introduction of ChatGPT, the number of AIGCs
(artificial intelligent-generated content) exploded, espe-
cially in academia, where ChatGPT became a useful tool for
researchers (Vaishya et al. 2023). Sandra Mitrovic´ (2023)
made text prediction based on the Transformer model and
used SHAP to explain the model. Although the text gener-
ated by ChatGPT is polite, without specific details and more
objective, the result table can still achieve a high accuracy
rate. ChatGPT can complete 80–90% of the code writing
tasks, and ChatGPT can retrieve multiple data sources well,
for example, in the ecological field, plant traits, species dis-
tribution areas, and meteorological data can be obtained
simultaneously (Merow et al. 2023). However, we must be
aware of some limitations and challenges of ChatGPT. It
may inadvertently generate false or false information, lead-
ing to misdirection and misunderstanding. ChatGPT lacks
common sense and background knowledge and can only
generate responses based on the information provided, which
can result in inaccurate or incomplete responses. Therefore,
careful verification and calibration are still required when
using content generated by ChatGPT. Especially in complex
fields (e.g., hydrology), the involvement of professionals is
very important.
Technical and socioeconomic
There are certain limitations in the structure, operational
model, and possibilities of traditional urban water supply
systems, and the water supply sector is moving in the direc-
tion of alternative solutions, and the realistic challenges
faced by this progressive transformation of traditional sys-
tems. Firstly, it is necessary to consider its cost-effective-
ness. DL algorithms need a large amount of data for training
to achieve the expected accuracy, and the verification pro-
cess may be very time-consuming, the computational cost of
the training process may be high, and there is many of uncer-
tain information in the engineering practice. It is unknown
whether its practical application value and effect can make
up for these costs. This is an unknown challenge for many
research institutions and enterprises. The DL systems of
the design, construction, and operation require advanced
technologies and equipment, such as wireless communica-
tion, automation, remote sensing, monitoring, and control.
The promotion and popularization of these technologies may
face problems such as high investment costs and inconsistent
technical standards. In addition, sustainability of use and
maintenance needs to be taken into account when imple-
menting a DL system, for instance, DL systems depend on
the operation and maintenance of equipment, which can
introduce additional cost and management challenges if
equipment fails or needs to be replaced due to technological
updates. At the same time, the transition from a traditional
centralized system to a distributed system may involve some
issues of conflict of interest and loss of vested interests that
need to be properly handled.
From a technical and socioeconomic perspective, they
are intertwined and interdependent, and all three need to be
transformed and co-developed over time, further, to form
new and stable integrated simulations of how the natural
socioeconomic systems feed each other to continue to pro-
vide safe and reliable services while addressing emerging
challenges.
Conclusion
This review paper serves to cover the importance of the DL
model in numerous instances related to water resources,
water environment, and water ecology. Firstly, this paper
introduces the development history of DL networks, and
then introduces the popular models in the field of water
science, such as CNN, LSTM, GRU, and GAN, to compare
and contrast the characteristics, advantages, and disadvan-
tages of different deep learning models. With respect to
the specific applications, the literature review indicates
that RNN is more suitable for solving time series prob-
lems, and has an evolutionary version of LSTM and shows
more satisfactory performance in long-term prediction.
RNN is widely used in water quality, runoff, hydrology,
and other parameters prediction. CNN is better at solv-
ing image processing research, such as water environment
remote sensing and image classification. For the unsuper-
vised learning algorithm GAN, which has emerged in
recent years, it has a good application in underwater bio-
logical image recognition because of its excellent generat-
ing ability. AE is more suitable for handling nonlinearity
and noise problems in capturing training wastewater data.
Many studies have shown that various hybridization tech-
niques can improve the performance of DL models. These
hybridization techniques come in various forms, includ-
ing combinations of different foundational DL models
(e.g., CNN-LSTM models), attention-based hybridization
(e.g., attention-GRU model), statistics-based hybridiza-
tion (e.g., SARIMA-LSTM model), and TL hybridization

(e.g., TL-LSTM model). According to the results of the
existing literature, it is found that the hybrid DL mod-
els were superior to the traditional DL model in terms
of accuracy and fitting. This may be due to the fact that
hybrid DL models perform well in a variety of specific
tasks, including feature extraction, trend learning, and data
manipulation. Further, we also hope to combine physical
models such as CFD to simulate the migration model of
hydrodynamic water quality pollutants. Most importantly,
the scope of this review paper is extended to as many areas
of water science as possible, including water quality pre-
diction, water environmental toxicology, water drainage
distribution system, hydrology and water resources, wet-
land classification, aquatic image recognition, water pol-
lution treatment, and other tasks, which distinguishes our
research from previous reviews on DL models and water
science. For each subfield, the DL model is discussed in
specific areas, focusing on promoting the transformation
of water ecological environment protection from pollution
prevention to systematic management and overall promo-
tion of water resources, water environment, water ecology
and other elements.
In addition, it is recommended to further study the seven
major challenges, namely, algorithmic optimization devel-
opment, interpretability and credibility, data validity, chal-
lenges and standardization of interdisciplinary and human
dynamics, the rise of AI tools, technology and socioeco-
nomic and digital twins, to shape water-environment inte-
gration innovation and collaborative development driven
by deep learning technologies. We hope that this review
will inspire people to think and act on future research and
applications, harness the power of deep learning to help
digitize water environmental systems, and inspire more
researchers to join the water-smart community and vigor-
ously advance the conservation and construction of beau-
tiful rivers and lakes to revolutionize water research and
practice.
Acknowledgements The authors thank all members of for their
friendly cooperation in completing this study.
Author contribution Xiaohua Fu: initial idea and conceptualization,
investigation, and visualization. Jie Jiang: methodology, writing—
original draft, and writing—review and editing. Xie Wu: methodology
and formal analysis. Lei Huang: resources, formal analysis, writing—
review and editing, and conceptualization. Rui Han: reviewing and
writing—review and editing. Kun Li: reviewing and writing—review
and editing. Chang Liu: reviewing and writing—review and editing.
Nesma Talaat Abbas Mahmoud: data curation, software, reviewing,
and writing—literature review. Jianyu Chen: reviewing and writing—
review and editing. Zhenxing Wang: supervision, funding acquisition,
project administration, and review and editing. Kallol Roy: conceptu-
alization, validation, review and editing, and supervision.
Funding This work was financially supported by the Major Science
and Technology Program for Water Pollution Control and Treatment
(2017ZX07101003), National Key Research and Development Project
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
(2019YFC1804800), the Science and Technology Program of Guang-
dong Forestry Administration (2020-KYXM-08), Pearl River S&T
Nova Program of Guangzhou, China (No. 201710010065), Youth
Foundation of SCIES (PM-zx097-202304-147), and European Social
Fund via IT Academy Program.
Data availability No data, material, or code is available associated with
the manuscript.
Declarations
Ethics approval Not applicable.
Consent to participate Not applicable.
Consent to publication This article has not been published before and
its publication has been approved by all co-authors.
Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests.
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