Delaware • New Jersey • Pennsylvania
New York • United States of America
Even though it's winter and most would prefer to be in the heated indoors, DRBC staff brave the elements to perform water quality testing in the Delaware River and its tributaries.
DRBC has deployed HOBO® monitors in six locations in the upper Delaware watershed to collect baseline water quality data that will provide a better understanding of pre-drilling conductivity and temperature ranges over a variety of flows and conditions. These monitors require periodic upkeep, and DRBC staff were in the field this month performing maintenance checks on the monitors located in the Delaware River at Callicoon and in the Oquaga and Shehawken creeks.
This month, sampling commenced for metals and supplemental physical-chemical data at 13 sites including the Delaware River at Easton, Pa. and at Riegelsville, N.J. The resultant data from this monitoring effort will inform a sound technical approach for developing protective and applicable water quality criteria for metals in these non-tidal freshwaters. The sites were sampled using clean hands techniques, which result in very low contamination of the sample by other metal sources.
Funded by the Pinchot Institute's U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities Healthy Forests and Waters Program, this monitoring effort, which began in the spring of 2012, focuses on assessing the relationship between land use types, development, and pollution loadings throughout the entire Neversink River Watershed, a N.Y. tributary to the upper Delaware River. Eight times a year, 20 water quality parameters are being evaluated at nine locations for three land use types: core forest, fragmented forest, and urban. The data will help evaluate the differences in pollutant loadings from specific land use types and development intensities.
January's sampling date happened to fall on one of the coldest days of the year. Staff bore the brunt of single-digit temperatures and negative wind chills to gather these samples!
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P.O. Box 7360, West Trenton, NJ 08628-0360
Phone (609)883-9500; Fax (609)883-9522
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