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Pooling Resources Across Organizations — Multisource Water-Quality Data for the Delaware River Basin

Fact Sheet 2020-3006
Integrated Water Availability Assessments Program
By:  and 
https://doi.org/10.3133/fs20203006

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Abstract

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) recently launched a pilot Integrated Water Availability Assessment (IWAA) in the Delaware River Basin to explore, test, and refine systems and processes for assessing water availability for human and ecological uses based on water monitoring data. Water-quality monitoring provides citizens, managers, and scientists with the information needed to evaluate the health of aquatic ecosystems and the safety and availability of water for drinking, agriculture, recreation, and other uses. Many organizations collect water-quality data at various sites and sampling frequencies to meet their assessment needs. The result is multiple individual datasets suitable for the specific organization’s needs that also hold great potential if pooled into a much larger dataset sourced from multiple organizations (multisource data). A multisource dataset increases the value and power of multiple single datasets and expands the breadth and depth of available water-quality data to ultimately increase the number and types of questions that can be answered. This fact sheet describes the process of “harmonizing” water-quality data from multiple organizations and presents a recently developed dataset for surface-water quality in the Delaware River Basin. This harmonized multisource surface-water-quality dataset will serve as a resource for analysis and modeling of surface-water quality to support IWAA efforts in the basin. Furthermore, this harmonization process can be expanded and applied to other regional IWAA basins or applied nationally.

Suggested Citation

Murphy, J.C., and Shoda, M.E., 2020, Pooling resources across organizations — Multisource water-quality data for the Delaware River Basin: U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2020–3006, 2 p., https://doi.org/10.3133/fs20203006.

ISSN: 2327-6932 (online)

Study Area

Table of Contents

  • Data Harmonization
  • Metadata Issues
  • Harmonized Water-Quality Data for the Delaware River Basin
  • References Cited
Publication type Report
Publication Subtype USGS Numbered Series
Title Pooling resources across organizations — Multisource water-quality data for the Delaware River Basin
Series title Fact Sheet
Series number 2020-3006
DOI 10.3133/fs20203006
Year Published 2020
Language English
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Publisher location Reston, VA
Contributing office(s) WMA - Earth System Processes Division
Description Report: 2 p.; Data Release
Country United States
State Delaware, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania
Other Geospatial Delaware River basin
Online Only (Y/N) Y
Additional Online Files (Y/N) N
Google Analytic Metrics Metrics page
Additional publication details