Watershed impacts & threats
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has for many years encouraged states and others to develop watershed plans to help protect and restore our waters. Due to the complex and diffuse nature of nonpoint source pollution, the substantial costs to address it, and frequent reliance on voluntary action by individual landowners, successfully addressing nonpoint source pollution to achieve water quality standards often requires years of support from a coalition of stakeholders, programs, and funding sources. Watershed planning helps address water quality problems in a holistic manner by fully assessing the potential contributing causes and sources of pollution, then prioritizing restoration and protection strategies to address these problems.
Learn more about the threats to Kiefer Creek:
Water quality is directly connected to the composition of the watershed. In the Kiefer Creek Watershed bacteria and chloride are delivered from the watershed area into the stream by stormwater runoff. Because of this connection is it very important to study water quality in terms of watershed composition, non-point source loading, and stormwater runoff. |
To do this we have begun studying the correlation between rainfall, flow, and bacteria levels using available data from the USGS, MDNR, and MSD. Water quality data are used to characterize waters, identify trends over time, identify emerging problems, determine whether pollution control programs are working, help direct pollution control efforts to where they are most needed, and respond to emergencies.
Watershed Assessment
The Watershed Assessment is a part of our EPA funded work to develop a watershed plan for the Kiefer Creek Watershed. The goal of the watershed assessment is to identify the sources of water pollution and watershed degradation. The watershed assessment should address all sources of listed impairments of a water. In Kiefer Creek recreational use is impaired due to high levels of bacteria and aquatic life use is impaired by high levels of chloride. The watershed assessment should also account for all other observed water quality issues or watershed impacts that are observed through the watershed planning process and updated periodically based on new data and observations--per the adaptive management process.
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Non-POINT SOURCE (NPS) POLLUTION
According to the Clean Water Act Section 502(14), a point source discharge is "any discernible, confined and discrete conveyance, including but not limited to any pipe, ditch, channel, tunnel, conduit, well, discrete fissure, container, rolling stock, concentrated animal feeding operation, or vessel or other floating craft, from which pollutants are or may be discharged. This term does not include agricultural storm water discharges and return flows from irrigated agriculture." A non-point source discharge is any pollution that cannot be classified as a point source discharge.
Water quality is directly connected to the composition of the watershed. In the Kiefer Creek Watershed bacteria and chloride are delivered from the watershed area into the stream by storm water runoff, a non-point source. Because of this connection is it very important to study water quality in terms of watershed composition, non-point source loading, and storm water runoff. To do this we have begun studying the correlation between rainfall, flow, bacteria and chloride levels using available data from the USGS, MDNR, MSD and others.
Water quality is directly connected to the composition of the watershed. In the Kiefer Creek Watershed bacteria and chloride are delivered from the watershed area into the stream by storm water runoff, a non-point source. Because of this connection is it very important to study water quality in terms of watershed composition, non-point source loading, and storm water runoff. To do this we have begun studying the correlation between rainfall, flow, bacteria and chloride levels using available data from the USGS, MDNR, MSD and others.