*2.1.1 The challenge being addressed*

With the rapid increase of population growth, the global demand and pressure for clean water supplies have never been more apparent. The UN Ocean Decade seeks to improve marine water quality through science. Legislation such as the Marine Strategy Framework Directive in Europe (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ TXT/?uri=CELEX:32008L0056), has led to improved monitoring of marine waters. However, with a growing list of emerging contaminants of concern, the challenge of monitoring is increasing. The ideal criteria for environmental monitoring tools include autonomous deployment, robust, quantitative, and qualitative output, and cost-effectiveness. It is important to have a highly flexible monitoring platform that can process a large variety of analytes under different conditions. The development of microfluidic sensors as cost-effective strategies for environmental monitoring has been a primary goal for the technology since the 1980s. It has played a pivotal role in the downsizing of sample ranges and complex assay protocols used in analyte detection. One such platform capable of this flexibility is the lab-on-a-disc centrifugal platform (LOAD) [14, 15], a derivative of the lab-on-a-chip (LOAC) [16–19] microfluidic platform.
