Inside the Netherlands’ Water Monitoring Success Story - Interview Bäuerlein, P.S.

“An effective water quality monitoring system must be easy to use, affordable, reliable, and – crucially – fast enough to trigger timely action. Over the past few decades, the Netherlands has built such a system: a harmonized early warning network based on online solid phase extraction (SPE) coupled to high-performance liquid chromatography with diode array detection (HPLC–DAD).
According to researchers at KWR Water Research Institute, this approach has become an indispensable link in the protection of Dutch surface waters and river ecosystems. In a recent paper, they describe how method harmonization, shared spectral libraries, and interlaboratory coordination transformed a relatively simple analytical technique into a national early warning platform.
We spoke with corresponding author Patrick S. Bäuerlein to find out how the system evolved – and what lessons other countries might draw from the Dutch experience.”

(Citation: Strachan, J. – Inside the Netherlands’ Water Monitoring Success Story – Interview Bäuerlein, P.S. – The Analytical Scientist (2026)February)