Water Quality Monitoring Program

Exploring and tracking climate signals in water resources.

On this page:

• About the Program
• Types of Assistance
• How This Program Helps Build Resilience
• Connections to Other EPA, Federal, or Non-Governmental Efforts

About the Program

Long-term water quality monitoring of our nation’s waters is essential to understand and manage climate change impacts and perform resilience planning. The EPA is working with states, tribes, and other partners to establish Regional Monitoring Networks (RMNs) at which biological, thermal, and hydrologic data are collected from least-disturbed streams and lakes to quantify and monitor changes in condition, including climate change trends. The EPA also works with states and tribes to implement the National Aquatic Resource Surveys (NARS) where co-located chemical, physical, and biological data from sites across the country are collected, representing least disturbed to highly disturbed sites. Data from both these efforts can support analyses of long-term trends and shifts in the biological, thermal, and hydrological regime of waters across the country.

Types of Assistance

The EPA supports enhancements to water quality monitoring in several ways including through the RMNs, NARS, and other mechanisms. The EPA offers states, tribes, federal agencies, local organizations, and researchers financial and technical assistance that can help build climate resilience.

Financial Assistance

• The EPA provides approximately $18.5 million annually in Clean Water Act Section 106 grants to states (including the District of Columbia and territories), eligible interstate agencies, and eligible tribes to enhance ambient water quality monitoring programs and implement a multi-year, statistically valid survey of the condition of the nation’s waters to track changes over time.
• NARS also periodically announces data analysis innovation challenges that relate to national priorities such as climate change. Winners may be awarded cash prizes and other opportunities. When available, information on the challenges can be found on Challenge.gov.

Technical Assistance

• Both the RMNs and the NARS produce high-quality data that scientists and resource managers can use to examine climate change concerns. The NARS data are available on the EPA’s website.
• The EPA has also developed guidance for water quality monitoring including development of monitoring strategies, development of biological monitoring programs, and resources for volunteer monitors.
• Through the RMN and NARS programs, the EPA provides standard operating procedures for field and lab work, support for development of statistical survey designs, planning considerations for establishment of RMNs focused on collecting data to address climate change issues, and approaches or tools for analyzing data. Examples of such documents include:
  • Information on NARS field and lab protocols
  • Best Practices for Continuous Monitoring of Temperature and Flow in Wadeable Stream
  • Regional Monitoring Networks (RMNs) to Detect Changing Baselines in Freshwater Wadeable Streams
  • Tools for site screening
  • Tools for continuous data
  • R tools to calculate biological metrics (the EPA has created an R package, SP Survey, for the design and analysis of probability surveys; other tools are expected to be available soon)
  • Information on assessing biological condition in surface waters
  • Information on how EPA assesses data in the NARS program
  • Water monitoring program guidance
  • Information on volunteer monitoring

How This Program Helps Build Resilience

Establishing RMNs and similar networks focused on high-quality waters can help:

• Establish baselines conditions to detect climate-related changes, particularly for least-disturbed sites, help identify ecologically relevant thresholds using the range of natural variation in water temperatures and flow.
• Identify habitat buffered from extreme climate impacts, also referred to as habitat refugia.
• Inform restoration and protection actions to create and maintain appropriate thermal and hydrologic conditions.

Collecting monitoring data at spatial scales across multiple states can help to identify changes in species distributions and community composition, which impact ecosystem condition.

Data generated by NARS can help identify signals or patterns of a changing climate, such as changes in taxonomic communities and distributions over time. These trends can measure resilience and the effectiveness of adaptation on the health of aquatic resources.

The EPA has compiled a list of journal articles that apply NARS data. Many of these journal articles address climate related issues.

Connections to Other EPA, Federal, or Non-Governmental Efforts

The EPA collaborates with a variety of partners to implement the NARS and RMNs. Collaboration occurs through workgroups, project support, and other venues.

States and other organizations such as the National Estuary Program, other federal agencies, and regional collaborations have also enhanced and leveraged NARS to conduct more localized assessments. For example:

• Minnesota sampled additional lakes and added parameters as part of the lakes survey to conduct state-scale assessments.
• Vermont sampled additional lakes and used data from the surveys to support lake habitat protection efforts throughout the state.
• National Estuary Programs, such as the Long Island Sound program, added monitoring sites in their jurisdictions to provide more localized assessments and allow for comparisons to regional and national results.

The data and products from these programs can also help establish or refine local, state, and regional projects designed to expand monitoring efforts or to apply the available data from the RMNs and NARS supporting efforts to address climate change.