By Jeffrey R. Deacon

Available from the U.S. Geological Survey, Branch of Information Services, Box 25286, Denver Federal Center, Denver, CO 80225, USGS Fact Sheet FS-032-97, 2 p.

The complete document is also available in pdf format: FS-032-97 (267 KB)
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As part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) program, an inventory of biological and contaminant investigations was conducted for the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCOL) study unit. Investigations conducted in the basin since 1938 were identified and categorized. The resulting information can be used to design biological sampling strategies to fill gaps in the biological and contaminant data and to effectively address water-quality issues in the UCOL study unit.

Introduction

The NAWQA program is designed to integrate physical, chemical, and biological components to assess water quality in 60 river basins nationwide. The biological component of this program focuses on: (1) Biological communities (algae, macroinvertebrates, and fish); (2) stream habitat characterizations; and (3) trace-element and organic contaminants in aquatic tissues and bed sediment (Gurtz, 1994). Existing biological and contaminant information was inventoried as the first step for implementation of the biological component of the NAWQA program for the UCOL study unit. The inventory of the historical data indicated the types of biological information available for the basin, the gaps in this information, and the implications for water-quality issues. Hydrology, climate, geology, topography, and land use vary substantially within the UCOL study unit and directly affect stream biology in the study unit. Therefore, these natural and human factors (Apodaca and others, 1996) were important in the information inventory.