Monitoring Committee

The Sacramento River Watershed Program (SRWP) has been monitoring water quality and coordinating with others in the Sacramento River and its major tributaries since 1998. The long-term goal of the SRWP is to develop a cost-effective, coordinated monitoring program that assessed baseline conditions in the Sacramento River and its tributaries to identify causes, effects and extents of problems, and to inform management decisions.

In 2006, SRWP published the Monitoring Program Summary reviewing all monitoring data collected in the 1998-2005 period. In 2007, grant funding for SRWP’s monitoring program ended. The overall consensus at that time was that coordinated monitoring should be continued and expanded.

Encouraged by its monitoring success, in 2008-2009 SRWP launched an effort to investigate a long-term, sustainable regional monitoring program (RMP) for the Sacramento River Watershed. That effort produced three related documents:

• RMP Investigation Report
• RMP Fact Sheet
• RMP Interview Summaries Memorandum

These documents recognize that an RMP could serve many purposes for Sacramento Valley communities, including:

• Determining background pollutant concentrations for permitting and assessing compliance with water quality standards
• Understanding pollutant fate and transport, linking water quality to beneficial uses and sources to impairment
• Establishing baseline conditions for water quality, sediment quality, biodiversity and ecological health
• Evaluating emerging (currently unregulated) contaminants
• Evaluating status and trends in conditions over time

Launching a Regional Monitoring Assessment Tool

SRWP is currently working with stakeholders to improve watershed health by providing accurate, timely, and graphic information about the Sacramento River Watershed. Stakeholders include anyone interested in more efficiently finding and assessing information on water quality conditions throughout the Sacramento River watershed – irrigators, urban stormwater managers, wastewater utilities, watershed groups, regulators, consultants, researchers, water purveyors, flood managers, fishery and habitat managers, and more.

We are developing a web portal that will provide open access to the extensive water monitoring data, study reports, photos and maps of the Sacramento River Watershed. Users will be able to compile maps and graphs to better visualize available data and answer questions about the watershed. We expect that this project will engender more effective water quality monitoring and, through assessment tools, improve our collective ability to make decisions and track progress.

Click here to download a two-page fact sheet about the Web Portal effort.

The web portal will be produced in OpenNRM, an Open Source Software Project dedicated to the communication of science and natural resource management information to all stakeholders. The outcome of this project will be a web-based tool which will organize and distill multiple sets of complex information (such as ambient water quality, aquatic species, geographic layers, and project documentation) into a format that our stakeholders can understand and manipulate for their own interests. The core OpenNRM software directly benefits from collaborative investment by stakeholders in the region. Universal improvements made to OpenNRM are likewise included in semi-annual updates as a download for product/project administrators.

Click here to sign up for Monitoring Committee updates.

If you are interested in joining the Monitoring Committee or discussing your monitoring interests individually, please contact:

Stephen McCord
SRWP Technical Coordinator
[email protected]

Holly Jorgensen
SRWP Executive Director
[email protected]

Regional Monitoring Assessment Tool Development Partners