Publications

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with local and other agencies, collects data at selected lakes throughout Wisconsin. These data, accumulated over many years, provide a data base for developing an improved understanding of the water quality of lakes. To make these data available to interested parties outside the USGS, the data are published annually in this report series...

Ground water contamination by crude oil, and other petroleum-based liquids, is a widespread problem. An average of 83 crude-oil spills occurred per year during 1994-96 in the United States, each spilling an average of about 50,000 barrels of crude oil (U.S. Office of Pipeline Safety, electronic commun., 1997). An understanding of the fate of organic contaminants (such as oil and gasoline...

This report contains papers presented at the seventh Technical Meeting of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Toxic Substances Hydrology (Toxics) Program. The meeting was held March 8-12, 1999, in Charleston, South Carolina. Toxics Program Technical Meetings are held periodically to provide a forum for presentation and discussion of results of recent research activities. The objectives of...

Water quality, physical habitat, and fish-community composition were characterized at 13 Twin Cities metropolitan area streams during low-flow conditions, September 1997. Fish communities were resampled during September 1998. Sites were selected based on a range of human population density. Nutrient concentrations were generally low, rarely exceeding concentrations found in agricultural...

A model that simulates lake stage was developed to test the current understanding of the hydrology of Shell Lake, Wisconsin and to provide a tool for predicting the effects of withdrawing lake water on future lake stages. The model code is written in Fortran and simulates daily lake stage by summing estimates of hydrologic-budget components - precipitation falling on the lake surface...

Water resources data for the 1998 water year for Michigan consists of records of stage, discharge, and water quality of streams; stage, contents, and water quality of lakes and reservoirs; and water levels and water quality of groundwater wells. This report contains discharge records for 141 streamflow-gaging stations; stage only records for 1 stream-gaging station and 20 lake-gaging...

Although considered the most important component for the establishment and persistence of wetlands, hydrology has been hard to characterize and linkages between hydrology and other environmental conditions are often poorly understood. In this work, methods for characterizing a wetland’s hydrology from hydrographs were developed, and the importance of ground water to the physical and...

An urban stormwater treatment unit was tested as part of an ongoing program of urban nonpoint- pollution research in Madison, Wis. Flow measurements were made and water samples were collected at the inlet to, outlet from, and bypass around the treatment chamber of the device that was installed to collect the runoff from a city maintenance yard. About 90 percent of the runoff water from...

Common carp (Cyprinus carpio) collected from four sites in the Red River of the North in 1994 were analyzed for arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), lead (Pb), nickel (Ni), selenium (So), and zinc (Zn). Concentrations differed among liver, muscle, and whole body. Generally, trace element concentrations were the greatest in livers while concentrations in whole bodies...

It is now well documented that impoundment of natural waters, with inundation of terrestrial area, results in enhanced conversion of inorganic mercury to methylmercury, a form that is toxic and bioaccumulates to a greater extent than inorganic mercury. Concentrations of mercury, methylmercury, and other water-quality constituents are reported from water sampled from flood-control...

Quarterly water-level measurements were analyzed to assess the effectiveness of a monitoring network of 26 wells in Huron County, Michigan. Trends were identified as constant levels and autoregressive components were computed at all wells on the basis of data collected from 1993 to 1997, using structural time series analysis. Fixed seasonal components were identified at 22 wells and...

Fish communities in the Upper Mississippi River Basin have been affected by changing environmental and land-use factors. Fish communities in small streams in agricultural and urban basins were compared to the fish community in a relatively undisturbed forested basin. In small streams, nutrient inputs from fertilizer, habitat modification from channelization, hydrologic modification from...