HydroFATE is a contaminant fate model designed to operate at a global scale using the HydroSHEDS river network. It integrates the global database of wastewater treatment plants HydroWASTE and distinguishes between treated and untreated contaminant pathways, providing high-resolution predictions of contaminant distributions in river systems worldwide. HydroFATE has been applied at regional scales to model 15 pharmaceuticals in the Saint Lawrence River Basin (Canada), diclofenac across the Indian subcontinent, and estrogens in China. At the global scale, it has been validated for 21 antibiotics, including the widely used sulfamethoxazole. The model has also been used to assess the cumulative concentrations of the 40 most widely consumed antibiotics worldwide, demonstrating its ability to identify risks associated with antibiotic contamination from domestic sources in rivers and lakes globally.

Visit HydroFATE’s interactive application.

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Read the associated papers:

• Antibiotics in the global river system arising from human consumption. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Nexus (Ehalt Macedo et al., 2025).
• HydroFATE (v1): a high-resolution contaminant fate model for the global river system (Ehalt Macedo et al., 2024).
• Estimating the eco-toxicological risk of estrogens in China's rivers using a high-resolution contaminant fate model (Grill et al., 2018).
• Prediction of household pharmaceutical concentrations in rivers of the Indian subcontinent using a contaminant fate model (Shakya, 2017).
• Risk assessment of down-the-drain chemicals at large spatial scales: Model development and application to contaminants originating from urban areas in the Saint Lawrence River Basin (Grill et al., 2016).