Omar Abdul-Aziz, a WVU Statler College researcher, points to a map while discussing his newly released model for diagnosing the health of freshwater streams in the United States. Credit: WVU Photo/Matt Sunday
Key points:
- A new model allows for easy public assessment of water quality.
- The model relies on water temperature and pH to give an accurate measure of the health of any freshwater stream.
- The tool is fully scalable and can be used to understand a stream's past, present and future conditions.
West Virginia University researcher Omar Abdul-Aziz has developed a model for predicting the levels of oxygen in water, giving citizen scientists a tool for taking action on U.S. stream pollution.
“I have been looking at water quality data for 20 years,” said Abdul-Aziz, an associate professor at West Virginia University. “I can tell you that a big percentage of streams in the United States are polluted. Urban streams are getting dumpster runoff, stormwater carrying lawn fertilizers and trash. Wastewater plants aren’t necessarily treating the dissolved organic carbon, nutrients and pharmaceuticals we’re putting into our sewage.”
Abdul-Aziz’s model relies on only water temperature and pH to give an accurate measure of the health of any freshwater stream in the United States. The research was recently published in Water Resources Research.
The model incorporates water quality information collected from 86 monitoring stations across 32 states between 1998 and 2015. The data set takes into consideration temperate, continental, arid and Mediterranean climates, as well as land uses as diverse as forests and grazing lands.
The information the model provides can help determine how the Environmental Protection Agency classifies a stream and whether the EPA will permit a project that affects a particular stream. For example, designation of a stream as impaired can impede project permitting by the EPA, which has emphasized the critical roles streams play in providing clean drinking water, reducing pollution and allowing economic activities such as agriculture and manufacturing.
“The tool is a simple mathematical model that uses only water temperature and pH to predict oxygen in the water,” Abdul-Aziz said. “People can plug in their temperature, which is readily available data, and their pH—or if they don’t have pH, I also offer a model with just temperature. Then they can see how water quality will change under different scenarios for climate, that is, temperature and changing land use.”
The tool is fully scalable and works for most any freshwater stream in the U.S.