You are here:
Condition of Lakes in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington
Citation:
Condition of Lakes in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.
Impact/Purpose:
This survey is a part of the EPA’s National Aquatic Resources Surveys (NARS) and National Lakes Assessment program to to assess the ecological condition of the 90 lakes sampled in the EPA Region 10 states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.
Description:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in collaboration with state agencies conduct monitoring of various aquatic resources to answer questions on the condition of the Nation’s waters. This series of surveys is conducted under EPA’s National Aquatic Resources Surveys (NARS) program. These surveys employ a statistical design that makes it possible to describe the quality of the resource across the Nation in terms of good, fair or poor condition relative to a reference condition or numeric standards. In addition, the extent of human disturbance can be described in relation to geographic variations. The NARS program initiated a survey of lakes called the National Lakes Assessment (NLA). Data were collected for this assessment from 1,028 lakes across the contiguous United States in summer 2007. This report uses a subset of the data from this larger project to assess the ecological condition of the lakes of the EPA Region 10 states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington (subsequently referred to as Region 10). A total of 90 lakes were sampled in Region 10. In general, most lakes in the Region are in good or fair condition based on the results of the indicators analyzed. The most widespread stressors are physical habitat quality of the lakeshore and shallow areas, and nutrients.