Water Quality

Issue : Degraded water quality and ecology in urban streams has been widely documented, but explanations of changing conditions over time are often unavailable. A 15-year collaborative urban stream monitoring effort between the Fairfax County Stormwater Planning Division and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is ongoing and has begun to shed light on this complex issue. In a new USGS report by...

The Roanoke River is the primary source of the City of Salem's drinking water. Threats to water quality in rivers like the Roanoke have increased in recent years, and water authorities as well as residents are concerned about preventing source water contamination. Realtime water quality monitoring is a valuable tool in alerting water authorities such as Salem Water when there are anomalous...

Proper management of contaminants of emerging concern in the Chesapeake Bay region requires scientific efforts to understand the risk posed to aquatic resources from the “cocktail” of multiple contaminants that is often present. This research aims to assess the occurrence, sources, environmental impacts, biological effects, and the human health impacts of toxic contaminants in rivers.

Issue: The USGS has revised loads and trends through 2020 from monitoring stations in the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) Nontidal Network (NTN). The original release of the results was in July 2022. During a process to implement a new software package for the next update of NTN data, the USGS discovered some questionable data values. Most of the questionable values were related to a coding...

Exposure to some per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has been linked to harmful health effects in humans and animals. The Virginia and West Virginia Water Science Center works with local and regional partners to determine the drivers and distribution of PFAS contamination in groundwater, surface water, and drinking water supplies across Virginia and West Virginia.

In 2019, the West Virginia legislature recognized the contamination risk to public source-water supplies posed by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and passed a resolution that required a statewide PFAS study. The purpose of this resulting study was to understand the occurrence and distribution of PFAS contamination throughout the state’s rivers, lakes, and groundwater aquifers. This...

Issue: The Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) partnership is striving to improve water-quality conditions in the Bay by using a variety of management strategies to reduce nutrient and sediment loads. The partnership uses monitoring results and modeling tools to implement management strategies, relying on the scientific community to synthesize existing information and direct new research to address...

Informed management of groundwater resources for the Eastern Shore of Virginia depends on the availability of detailed and up-to-date scientific information. The USGS and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality are conducting a long-term cooperative study to enhance the understanding of groundwater resources in the sole-source aquifer system beneath Accomack and Northampton counties...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with Resource Protection Group, Inc. is partnering with Reston Association to monitor the hydrology, water-quality, and ecology of two restored urban streams in Reston, Virginia – Snakeden Branch and The Glade. A combination of continuous and discrete hydrologic and water-quality data are collected to evaluate stream conditions and estimate sediment and...

The ecological limit functions (ELF) developed in cooperation with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) are a graphical representation of the current and historical state of aquatic biota in Virginia streams. The goal of this study was to quantify the potential species richness and habitat response to flow alteration using available long-term ecological data. Fish and benthic...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), is monitoring the water quality of multiple high-priority streams where natural gas pipeline crossings have been proposed. The purpose of the monitoring effort is to collect baseline water-quality data and, if the pipeline construction is approved, to monitor water quality in these...

The U.S. Geological Survey, partnering with the City of Roanoke and Virginia Tech, are working to monitor the water volume and quality in streams throughout the City of Roanoke. There are currently six monitoring stations within the city. Water-quality data are collected at five stations through real-time monitors and manual sampling to support the estimation of suspended sediment loads. The...