2023 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference

March 5-7, 2023 • Cincinnati, OH

5/20/2019 | 3:00 PM - 3:15 PM | 25 YEARS OF WATER QUALITY CHANGE IN RHODE ISLAND LAKES AND PONDS | 253 AB

25 YEARS OF WATER QUALITY CHANGE IN RHODE ISLAND LAKES AND PONDS

University of Rhode Island’s Watershed Watch Volunteer Monitoring Program has been collecting water quality data on Rhode Island lakes for over 25 years, allowing exploration of long-term trends in water quality parameters. Not all lakes in the study area were sampled across the time period and lakes were often added in geographic clusters (e.g. in urbanized Rhode Island). Similar to how long-term temperature records are analyzed, we centered and scaled water quality measurements on a per-station basis. This provides a robust and commonly scaled measurement to explore this data for long-term trends. Aggregation of lakes showed increasing temperature, chlorophyll a, and total nitrogen. Interestingly, total phosphorus is declining, perhaps reflecting management focus on phosphorus reductions. Additionally, while most sites track the yearly trend in decreasing water quality, there are bright spots with a few sites improving over the 25 years. Contrary to other analyses that show relatively stable quality at the regional scale, our analysis shows that long-term water quality within Rhode Island show some parameters improving while others decline. Importantly, this analysis points out the value of data from long-term monitoring programs for identifying trends in environmental condition.

Eutrophication
Temperature
Water Quality

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Presenters/Authors

Betty Kreakie (), Environmental Protection Agency, Kreakie.Betty@epa.gov;