(Taken from the DNR's January/February 2002 Iowa Conservationist)

Iowans rely on water every day, whether it be for drinking, bathing and washing, or for recreating such as boating, swimming and fishing. 

With all those uses, surely someone is keeping tabs on the quality of our water resources? Someone who knows what our water should look like?

That's the focus of Iowa's Ambient Water Monitoring Program. The mission of the program is to collect baseline, or background ("ambient") data on the condition of Iowa's surface and groundwater resources, so their health can be tracked over time. It also ensures appropriate information is available to guide resource management policies and decisions. The process must be ongoing and continual, because it is difficult - if not impossible - to draw conclusions regarding the health of our waters based on a single year's data.

Ambient water monitoring can be compared to an annual physical examination. If your family physician knows what your health has been in the past, it will be easier to notice any changes, and then fix any ailments that arise. Similarly, when the DNR knows what the quality of a given water body should be, it is easier to identify impairments and develop solutions for existing water quality issues.

The mission of the ambient program is sometimes difficult to understand. "Oftentimes, people don't understand that our program is meant to gather information," said DNR research geologist Mary Skopec. "They understand what they see in the news - there are high bacteria levels at this beach or there was a fish kill in this river. The immediate response is, 'Why aren't you cleaning this up?'"

The program does in fact share information with regulatory areas of the DNR, for instance, often with administrators of the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program - whose job is cleaning up impaired waters in Iowa. The TMDL approach can be compared the tests a physician would perform if you were to come to him or her and complain of a specific problem. If you complained of "stomach pains," the doctor would ask pointed questions and run targeted tests to diagnose the cause of your pain. TMDL administrators determine the cause of water problems in the same manner; a general problem is recognized, and intensive, focused measures are used to identify its source.

The job of ambient monitors, however, is not to regulate nor clean up contaminated water sources. "If we find a problem that needs attention, of course we inform the appropriate people," Skopec added, "but that is not our primary purpose." The ambient program allows the state to test not only those waters identified as impaired but also those not known to have any problems. This way, an accurate picture of the total water quality across Iowa can be achieved.

DNR water quality monitoring in the past has been minimal, due primarily to lack of funding. Surface water monitoring began in the early 1970s on a handful of sites clustered mainly around the state's larger urban areas. Several sites were added in 1986, when the program was revamped in an effort to improve monitoring efforts in non-urban areas, but even with these improvements the state's monitoring was inadequate. (These new sites were measured on a rotational basis so only 11 were checked yearly, in addition to the 16 original sites tested monthly.)

The DNR received about $123,000 annually in federal funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to complete the early surface monitoring. EPA also footed the bill (approximately $50,000 annually) for biological monitoring from 1994 to 1999. That changed in 1999. Thanks to support from Gov. Thomas Vilsack and the Iowa Legislature, the ambient program was awarded its first state funding in the 2000 fiscal year. The Legislature has since approved additional funds, to significantly expand the state's ambient monitoring program. In fiscal year 2002, $2.5 million was devoted to that end.

The program is now running full-steam ahead. Working in cooperation with the University of Iowa Hygienic Laboratory (UHL), the DNR now monitors 79 ambient stream sites and 10 city sites (located upstream and downstream of 10 larger cities in Iowa) on a monthly basis, and has expanded its biological monitoring. Biological testing involves DNR and UHL scientists sampling fish and small aquatic and organisms. The presence or absence of these creatures, and the numbers found, can indicate how healthy a stream actually is.