Development and Analysis of a Water Quality Monitoring Program for the Pockwock Lake Watershed

Abstract

Municipal Source Water Protection Plans (SWPPs) are instituted in efforts to maintain and protect water quantity and quality. An integral part of a SWPP is the Source Water Monitoring Plan (SWMP). Without well defined metrics it is impossible to determine if a SWPP is effective and meeting its general goals of maintaining water quantity and quality. A 16 month intensive monitoring plan was implemented to examine how a SWMP should be structured and how acquired data needs to be analyzed in order to answer specific water quality questions that may be posed. This thesis demonstrates the temporal and spatial variability of water quality data and discusses the utilization of common water quality metrics. The importance of developing goals for SWMP is stressed as, due to the range of information that can be acquired from different sampling strategies, SWMPs need to be tailored to meet the goals of a monitoring program.