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...

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...

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...

Pennsylvanian- and Mississippian-age aquifers occupy approximately 86,000 square-miles in the Appalachian Plateaus Physiographic Province of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama. As one of several USGS Regional Groundwater Studies, the primary goal of this study is to provide a regional understanding of groundwater flow and availability in the...

In recent years, hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested into the implementation of Best Management Practices in Fairfax County, Virginia, with the goal of improving water quality. Research has demonstrated that best management practices are effective at smaller scales, but less information is available to document the effectiveness of these best management practices at the watershed...

In 2015, the U.S. Geological Survey partnered with the Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD) in cooperation with the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission to implement a water-quality monitoring program in six major cities across the Hampton Roads region. This long-term monitoring program consists of a network of 12 water-quality monitoring stations, 2 per jurisdiction, across the cities...

The Clinch and Powell Rivers flowing from southwestern Virginia through parts of East Tennessee (see Figure 1) support unique and nationally significant endemic and endangered populations of fresh-water mussels and other aquatic fauna. Surveys of mussel and fish community structure over past decades have shown a pattern of decline throughout the Powell River and on parts of the upper Clinch that...

This successful partnership brings together Randolph-Macon College (RMC), Washington and Lee University (W&L), and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), in partnership with the US Geological Survey (USGS) to foster growth in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) through summer student internship experience, awareness of USGS science in the classroom, and increased understanding of...

As urban and rural growth continues, competition for clean water expands into stream areas previously capable of meeting local water-use demands. Conflicts among instream and offstream users of streamflow increase as flows decrease. This research enhances understanding of summer low-flow conditions in the North Fork, South Fork, and Shenandoah Rivers, relating water availability to physical...