Letter Report Assessing the USGS National Water Quality Assessment Program's Science Plan (2011) / Chapter Skim
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Letter Report
Letter Report
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The Science Plan is the high level planning F F document that will guide the NAWQA program through the next 10 years of water quality monitoring. Your letter dated December 14th, 2010 asked the committee to provide additional advice on NAWQA's progress in the Cycle 3 planning process, focusing particularly on whether the draft NAWQA Science Plan sets forth adequate priorities and direction for the future.
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By selectively increasing temporal and spatial resolution when and where it is needed, dynamic monitoring contributes to understanding of complex water quality phenomena and allows improved forecasting of likely future conditions. The committee compliments the NAWQA Cycle 3 Team for envisioning a bold plan for the coming decade, with priority placed on dynamic water quality monitoring.
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Including points such as the following will enhance the draft Science Plan: Simply maintaining traditional water quality monitoring will result in USGS lagging behind in providing the necessary science to solve the nation's water problems as population growth, changes in land use, and climate variability continue to stress our nation's water resources; Water resources problems need to be addressed through a systems approach by considering a range of effects on water quality caused by multiple stressors; NAWQA is uniquely positioned to lead the nation in a dynamic national synthesis of water quality information and understanding because it has infrastructure in place, interdisciplinary and collaborative experience, state-of-the-art analytical capability, and modeling capacity to do this work (NRC 2002; NRC, 2009) ; NAWQA provides unique management-relevant assessments and tools within the public domain and has developed the capability and coordination to get needed science to decision makers (USGS, 2010)
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As NAWQA moves forward with a more dynamic approach to its program, the distinction between sampling parameters for traditional water quality monitoring and sampling for dynamic water quality changes becomes more important. NAWQA has utilized a periodic approach in assessments of pesticides in hydrologic systems and found remarkable added value (Box 2)
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With advice from the NRCs Committee to Review the USGS National Water Quality Assessment Pilot Program (NRC, 1990) , the USGS adopted a more integrated approach with respect to surface water and groundwater interaction by implementing 60 "integrated" study units in Cycle 1.
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Since then, the USGS has developed some of these services and resources more fully and offers support to all programs within the USGS. After 20 years of NAWQA operations in parallel with these significant changes in USGS capabilities, particularly in the USGS Office of Communications, the committee sees value in NAWQA management revisiting the relative merits of using NAWQA program funds to handle communications and possibly other program support services instead of drawing on comparable services and resources provided at the agency level.
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Also, in the final report the committee will answer the statement of task in its entirety and also speak to a number of issues and related topics raised during the review of this letter and deferred to the final report2. The NAWQA program has a history of working in the multidisciplinary interface, and this experience could benefit the USGS as it implements a re-alignment and in the face of certain fiscal 2 Topics deferred to the final report include the history of NAWQA and what makes a national water quality assessment program, further probing priorities and trade-offs in light of current fiscal realities, a more detailed discussion of the technical aspects of the Science Plan, and a deeper discussion about internal collaborative approaches in light of the USGS reorganization.
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The extent of water quality degradation from demographic and associated land use changes, agricultural chemicals, climate change, energy production, human use, and other factors must be characterized and quantified for effective water resources management. The NAWQA Program is looked to as a model for water quality monitoring outside the U.S.
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