Identifying specific water quality problems

This picture shows a stream segment identified as impacted through a watershed monitoring program and before best management practices were implemented.

Here is the same stream as the previous picture after the riparian area has been restored and best management practices including vegetated buffers and animal fencing have been implemented.

Monitoring can be used to target areas in a watershed that exhibit greater potential for problems than other areas. For example, a subwatershed that is composed primarily of agricultural land uses may be expected to have higher nutrient loads than a neighboring forested watershed. These targeted watersheds can be monitored to evaluate the need for appropriate management practices.


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Common Monitoring Objectives

Water Quality Monitoring Objectives

To properly manage a water resource, you need to know all about the water body and the watershed it drains. Watershed monitoring is a major part of the process for collecting this information and is therefore an essential component to water quality assessment and to watershed management. The information collected can support sound decision-making by identifying high quality waters and tracking their condition over time, by providing clues to the sources and levels of pollution for waters that are impaired or threatened, by helping managers understand the impacts of human activities within the watershed, and by providing input data used in water quality models. So without crucial monitoring data, we might not know exactly where a pollution problem exists, where we need to focus our watershed management energies, or where we may have made progress. Water quality monitoring programs are designed to serve many purposes.

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Section 4 of 19