text: Organic matter plays an important role in drinking water and wastewater treatment and recycling, natural aquatic ecosystems, aquaculture, and environmental rehabilitation. It is therefore important to have reliable methods of detection and characterisation, for both short- and long-term monitoring. A variety of analytical detection methods for organic matter have existed for up to decades, to describe and characterise organic matter. These include, but are not limited to: total and dissolved organic carbon, mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, infrared (IR) spectroscopy, UV-Visible spectroscopy, and fluorescence spectroscopy. Each of these methods has its own advantages and limitations.