Abstract |
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in Wisconsin on watershed management and restoration activities, yet certain farming, and suburban and urban development practices continue to significantly impact a large portion of the state's waters, and in some areas of the state severe stream degradation is readily apparent. Improvements in the assessment of Wisconsin stream resources are needed to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the state's waters. Greater understanding of land use factors affecting water resources will help improve land and water resource management, and broader dissemination of this information is needed to improve the political decision-making processes for these management activities. To date, stream monitoring conducted by the WDNR has primarily been targeted sampling to provide information for stream-specific management issues. Physical, chemical, and biological data are often collected from either highly degraded streams affected by polluted run-off, or from high quality streams where game fish management or stream habitat enhancement efforts are being evaluated. This resulting data set can be strongly biased if used for making inferences about broad-scale conditions of stream resources. Spatial clustering of the WDNR's current sampling effort on a relatively small proportion of the State's streams and a focus on larger streams that support adult game fish also limit the ability to make meaningful statements about Wisconsin's entire stream population. Beginning in 2003, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR), with support from the EPA's Regional Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (REMAP), conducted an assessment of the physical, chemical, and biological conditions of wadeable streams in the Driftless Area ecoregion in western Wisconsin using a probabilistic sampling design. The Driftless Area ecoregion encompasses 20 percent of Wisconsin's total land area and contains 21 percent of the State's perennial
stream miles.
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