Workshop activities included a presentation on Integrated National Monitoring Strategy by Elizabeth Jester Fellows (Monitoring Branch, Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA)); a plenary session addressing key findings from NPS watershed programs, local initiatives for NPS control programs, and opportunities for collaboration among federal, state, and local programs, and introducing the Section 319 National Monitoring Program; 16 work sessions on specific topics; and a tour of the Long Creek Watershed 319 National Monitoring Program Project located in Gaston County.

Selected highlights of presentations and discussions among 95 participants from 27 states are summarized below.

Overview of the Section 319 National Monitoring Program

The Section 319 National Monitoring Program is mandated by Section 319 of the Clean Water Act as amended in 1987. Program goals are to: 1) document the water quality benefits of nonpoint source (NPS) pollution control programs; 2) improve understanding of the effectiveness of NPS efforts; and 3) develop better NPS projects.

Funding for the program comes from a 5% setaside of annual Section 319 funds allocated to U.S. EPA Regions. The process by which 319 National Monitoring Program projects are selected involves identification of candidate projects by the states in consultation with U.S. EPA Regions, review and recommendation of proposed projects by USEPA Headquarters, and approval and awarding of grants by the Regions. At present, the focus of the program is on stream systems. Although the majority of projects funded to date involve agricultural NPS pollution, projects can address NPS problems from sources such as urban or forested areas. Criteria for selection of 319 National Monitoring Program projects include:

• 6- to 10-year project

• Critical area clearly defined

• Best management practices (BMPs) to be implemented address the pollutant causing the water quality program

• Monitoring of land treatment and water quality with a feedback loop ensuring that water quality data become an integral part of the ongoing project

• Minimum monitoring criteria met (e.g., sampling frequency adequate, appropriate explanatory variables to be measured)

• High probability of success

• Reporting requirements (annual and 5-year reports)

Factors Affecting Successful Detection of Water Quality Change

• Land treatment sufficient to achieve the project's water quality goals.

• Explanatory variables accounted for (e.g., precipitation, number and type of animals, streamflow, depth to water table, soil type).

• Experimental design selected (paired watershed, upstream/downstream, before/after) is the best possible design for the study.

• Monitoring regime is consistent throughout the project.

• Samples will be collected at regularly-spaced intervals.

• Duration of monitoring (number of years) is sufficient: at least two years of pre-BMP-implementation monitoring and four to eight years of post-implementation monitoring.

• Statistical analyses to be conducted are appropriate for answering the questions posed.

Local Project Cooperation and Team Building

• Cooperation among agencies and team-building to enhance such cooperation must be a key element of any NPS project.

• Agencies may have common goals (e.g., protection or restoration of water resources) but very different ways of approaching those goals.

• Interagency cooperation toward achieving experimental design protocol is paramount.

• Ownership of the water quality problem by local governments and landowners is critical.

• Volunteer efforts can enhance projects.

• Funding for land treatment is a major concern in some 319 National Monitoring Program projects.

• Local institutions, including private organizations and universities, should be invited to become involved in projects.

Information and Education and Producer Participation

• Farmers are often reluctant to implement practices (which are new to them) because the result of doing so may be lost income. Projects need to find ways of either helping farmers overcome their fear of these risks or ways of compensating them for losses which do occur as a result of adoption of BMPs. Approaches can include providing financial incentives more in the form of guarantees against loss versus cost share funds to implement BMPs (here the farmer would receive no money if the practice resulted in equivalent or higher income, but would be compensated if he or she lost money due to adoption of the BMP).

• Respect for and consideration of social, religious, and cultural realities of the community in the project area is essential.

• Often the people willing to participate in the project are not the worst offenders. Strategies need to be developed to raise the awareness of and motivate major polluters to participate in NPS control efforts.

• Should farm operators be treated differently from other small businesses which are required to implement pollution prevention measures? Arguments were made both pro and con!

• Exchange of newsletters among projects was discussed and accepted as an approach to improving communication among NPS projects. NCSU Water Quality Group will facilitate this exchange among workshop participants by disseminating a list of projects and programs which publish a newsletter and/or would like to receive other projects' newsletters.

Pre-project Planning: Setting Realistic, Attainable, Measurable Water Quality & Land Treatment Goals

As part of the process of establishing realistic and measurable goals, project teams should write a problem statement that: 1) states what the impaired water use is; 2) identifies the location of the problem; 3) refers to a specific pollutant or pollutants; and 4) identifies a source or suspected source of the pollutant. Once the problem statement has been written, water quality monitoring and land treatment goals can be set. These should be as specific as possible and there must be a mechanism for determining whether or not they have been achieved (they must be measurable).

Examples of effective and ineffective goals are:

Effective goal:      	Reduce phosphorus load to
			Giant Reservoir by 45%

Less effective goal: 	Reduce pollution in Giant Reservoir

Measures of success for each goal must be established at the beginning of the project. Useful measures include sampling to determine concentrations (or loads) of a specific pollutant for goals calling for a specified reduction in a pollutant. Measures such as opinion polls or measuring volume or weight of trash removed from a stream can be used to evaluate progress in efforts to educate watershed residents about conservation.

Land Treatment Implementation Strategy - How Much and Proper BMP Selection

• How to select appropriate BMPs or BMP systems when BMP effectiveness can range from 0 to almost 100% on similar sites?

• How to separate the impact (effectiveness) of individual BMPs or BMP systems versus the amount (area) of BMP coverage.

• How to establish criteria for determining land treatment coverage (area), which could be based on the pollutant, the transport mechanism, an environmental endpoint, agro-ecological conditions, or other factors.

• More controlled experiments should be conducted to relate water quality changes to the amount of land treatment implementation. What experimental design(s) should be used in these experiments?

Proper Experimental Design for Relating Water Quality Changes to Land Treatment Implementation

Effectiveness of several experimental designs for projects whose objective is to document water quality changes resulting from implementation of land treatment (BMPs and BMP systems) were discussed:

• The above/below design, in which monitoring is conducted both upstream and downstream of the treated area, is useful as long as pre-project baseline monitoring has been conducted at both locations to make it possible to isolate the effect of the land treatment.

• In the paired watershed design, two similar watersheds are monitored during a calibration (pre-treatment) period to establish a relationship between the watersheds. Following the calibration period, land treatment is applied to one watershed, while the other remains untreated (control). This design facilitates isolation of water quality changes due to land treatment effects from the effects of other factors. However, it is often difficult to prevent land treatment on the control watershed.

• A significant problem with the single watershed before/after BMP-implementation approach is that it is not possible to distinguish differences in water quality detected due to climatic differences versus land treatment.

• Designs employing comparison of two watersheds which do not have similar characteristics (such as size, land use, slope, soils) are like comparing apples and oranges. In such cases, it is not possible to differentiate water quality differences due to land treatment versus those due to dissimilarities between the two watersheds.

Tracking Land Treatment and Land Use Measurement (s) for Specific BMP Systems

Monitoring for the Effectiveness of Individual BMPs vs. a System of BMPs

The consensus of workshop participants was that, assuming that the project objective is not specifically to understand the effect of a single BMP, systems of BMPs are more effective in addressing most water quality problems than any individual BMP. For example, to reduce sedimentation of an estuary adjacent to rangeland characterized by overgrazing, the following BMPs might be used simultaneously: restricting livestock access to streams, restoration of riparian areas, rotational grazing, water source management, sediment traps, and gully stabilization. No one BMP is likely to be as effective as some combination of BMPs hosen based upon local conditions and acceptability to farm operators.

Water Quality and Land Treatment Data Storage, Reporting, and Evaluation

The 319 National Monitoring Program projects are required to prepare annual and five-year reports for USEPA using the NPSMS (NonPoint Source Management System) software. Questions about use of the software itself should be directed to Horizon Systems (Cindy McKay, 703-471-0480), on contract to USEPA to provide technical assistance to the projects on software use.

Questions related to the kind of information that should be included or where it should be placed in annual reports (due September first each year) should be referred to Steve Dressing, USEPA (202) 260-7110.

Technical assistance on water quality and land treatment monitoring design and data analysis for 319 National Monitoring Program projects is being provided by both the NCSU Water Quality group (Jean Spooner: 919-515-3723) (for projects located in USEPA Regions I - VII) and Oregon State University Water Resources Research Institute (JoBeth Mullens: 503-737-4026) (for projects located in USEPA Regions VIII, IX, X).

Questions about STORET and BIOS data management systems should be addressed to the following USEPA staff: Lee Manning (703-235-5627), Joyce Boyd (703-235-5586), Dan Parker (703-235-5584) or Clarence Tutwiler (STORET questions only) (703-235-5585).

The 1992 annual review of nonpoint source literature prepared by the NCSU Water Quality Group has been published in the June issue of Water Environment Research. The review includes 246 references and covers nonpoint source policy, water quality management and economics; water quality of water resources; best management practices for nonpoint source pollution control; and nonpoint source modeling and monitoring.

Free copies may be ordered from the Publications Coordinator, NCSU Water Quality Group, 615 Oberlin Rd., Suite 100, Raleigh, NC 27605-1126. (Please refer to WQ-81 when ordering.)

The U.S.Department of Agriculture (USDA) Working Group on Water Quality recently released Water Quality: A Report of Progress. The publication reports on progress made in meeting the objectives of USDA's Water Quality Program, initiated in 1989 as part of the President's Water Quality Initiative. The Water Quality Program is a coordinated effort to protect the nation's water from contamination by agricultural chemicals. USDA agencies involved include the Agricultural Research Service and Cooperative State Research Service (handling research aspects of the program); Extension Service, Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, and Soil Conservation Service (providing educational, financial, and technical assistance, respectively); and Economic Research Service and the National Agricultural Statistics Service (providing data bases, evaluation, and assessment). Other cooperators include the Departments of the Interior and Commerce, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and many state agencies.

The aim of the program is to provide farmers, ranchers, and foresters with the knowledge, technical means, and financial assistance to respond independently and voluntarily in addressing farm-related environmental concerns and related state water quality requirements. Program priorities are being addressed through 11 major activities:

• Building national and state data bases on agrichemical use and related farm activities;

• Providing digitized geographic information system data for state and federal evaluation of alternative policies and program strategies;

• Developing methods for sampling, measuring, and evaluating ground water contamination;

• Conducting research to provide the basis for improved management of chemicals used in agriculture;

• Improving agrichemical management and agricultural production systems;

• Expanding USDA staff capacity to deliver educational and technical assistance to producers for effective agrichemical and waste product management and environmental stewardship;

• Demonstrating and delivering technologies and management systems for voluntary farmer, rancher, and forester adoption and implementation;

• Providing financial assistance to agricultural producers to accelerate the installation of measures designed to improve water quality;

• Meeting state water quality requirements through educational and technical assistance;

• Evaluating the economic, social, and technical impacts of new and improved management practices and systems; and

• Informing the public of program activities and achievements.

Copies of the report, as well as the Water Quality Program Plan and annual work plan, may be requested from the Working Group on Water Quality, U.S. Department of Agriculture. (202) 205-5853. For more information contact: Fred N. Swader, Executive Secretary, Working Group on Water Quality, (202) 205-5853.

NWQEP NOTES is issued bimonthly. Subscriptions are free within the United States (contact: Publications Coordinator at the address below or via email at: wq_puborder@ncsu.edu). A list of publications on nonpoint source pollution distributed by the NCSU Water Quality Group is included in each hardcopy issue of the newsletter.

I welcome your views, findings, information, and suggestions for articles. Please feel free to contact me.

Judith A. Gale, Editor
Water Quality Extension Specialist
North Carolina State University Water Quality Group
Campus Box 7637
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695
Tel: 919-515-3723
Fax: 919-515-7448
email: notes_editor@ncsu.edu