An Interoperable Web Platform for Water Quality Monitoring and Remediation in the Mediterranean: the iWIRE Platform

Chemical pollution poses a growing threat to aquatic ecosystems and water resources across the Mediterranean region, driven by contaminants of emerging concern and complex land–sea interactions. Addressing this challenge requires tools capable of integrating datasets at multiple spatial and temporal scales and user-friendly interfaces to support knowledge sharing across diverse territorial and social contexts. Within this framework, the Water Information and Remediation Platform (iWIRE) has been developed as part of the EU Horizon Europe project iMERMAID (Innovative solutions for Mediterranean Ecosystem Remediation via Monitoring and decontamination from Chemical Pollution).

iWIRE is a web-based platform designed to collect, harmonise, and visualise environmental and water quality data, providing a unified entry point to explore site-specific characteristics, monitoring data, climate conditions, and the performance of remediation activities.

From a research software perspective, iWIRE addresses key challenges related to reproducibility, interoperability, and usability in geoscientific platforms. The system is built on a fully open-source technology stack and follows a modular design, allowing individual components to be updated, extended, or reused across different projects and environmental contexts.

The platform supports interoperability by integrating heterogeneous datasets from laboratory analyses, in situ sensors, climate services, satellite-derived datasets, and regulatory sources. Data ingestion is enabled through a wide range of input formats, from simple text files to standardised data structures and API-based connections. This approach enables seamless data exchange between tools and facilitates cross-disciplinary analyses spanning hydrology, environmental monitoring, and water treatment processes.

iWIRE has been tested across five Mediterranean pilot areas, providing concrete case studies that demonstrate its operational use in real-world environmental monitoring and remediation assessment. These examples highligh how research software can effectively bridge scientific analysis and decision-making in applied geoscience contexts.

The platform software architecture combines a modular Content Management System with interactive data-visualisation dashboards. Public-facing content and access management are handled through a Drupal-based frontend, while use-case dashboards are developed in Redash and dynamically connected to structured datasets hosted in relational databases, online spreadsheets, or accessed via APIs. This architecture enables near-real-time updates, flexible data integration, and consistent visualisation across heterogeneous data sources.

To address data-sensitivity constraints, the platform supports differentiated access levels, combining publicly accessible dashboards with restricted views for confidential wastewater treatment plant data.