You are here:
Technical Approaches for Answering the Question: What is the condition of the Nation's Waters?
Citation:
Paulsen, Steve, Phil Kaufmann, AND Tony Olsen. Technical Approaches for Answering the Question: What is the condition of the Nation's Waters? National Water Quality Monitoring Conference, Tampa, FL, May 02 - 06, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation will discuss options for combining survey data to answer a broad assessment question.
Description:
The National Aquatic Resource Surveys were designed to answer the question of the status and trends in the condition of each of our aquatic resources: coastal waters, lakes and reservoirs, rivers and streams and wetlands. At the higher levels, the EPA is consistently asked a seemingly simpler question. That question revolves around the “all the nation’s waters”, not individual resource categories. Each of the aquatic resources on which NARS focuses are reporting on different dimensions of the resource, i.e., coastal waters and wetlands are reported as area, lakes and reservoirs are reported as numbers of systems, and rivers and streams are reported as length. This presentation discusses the options available for taking the NARS results and combining them across surveys to report on all the nation’s waters. We will discuss the implications for policy use of the assessments and the implications for future designs.