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Improving Our Understanding and Helping with Water Quality Improvements Active

By Chesapeake Bay Activities September 30, 2019

Understanding trends in stream chemistry is critical to watershed management and often complicated by multiple contaminant sources and landscape conditions changing over varying time scales.

Excessive nitrogen and phosphorus are among the most pervasive, damaging, and costly stressors in surface waters. A new USGS study adapted spatially referenced regression modeling to infer causes of recent nutrient trends in Chesapeake Bay tributaries. This approach provides new insights on the roles that wastewater reductions, urban growth, agriculture, and atmospheric deposition have had on nutrient loads in streams over a 20-year time period. These insights support management actions implemented by Federal and state agencies who are responsible for managing water quality across a diverse landscape.

Read the paper in JAWRA → https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1752-1688.12756

For more information on USGS SPARROW modeling see their web page.



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