http://watersgeo.epa.gov/mwm/

Curious about the water quality of streams and rivers near your house? Check out this website! MyWATERS Mapper shows snapshots of waterways right from the Environmental Protection Agency Office of Water program data. This website contains huge databases of information just a click away on an interactive map: the status of the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), which is a program established under the Clean Water Act that controls water pollution by regulating point sources in the United States for each State; information from the Clean Watershed Needs Survey, which is a comprehensive assessment of the primary needs of waterways in order to meet the water quality goals laid out in the Clean Water Act; and finally, water quality assessments of nutrients, sedimentation, and pathogens levels.

I looked up a stream near my house in Philadelphia called Neshaminy Creek (Neshaminy was once a Native American tribe in the region) and discovered that it has a sedimentation problem from a non point source (which makes sense if sedimentation is caused by runoff). I was also able to observe other streams in the area and where they drained into the Delaware River, which is the receiving water body for most of the waterways in the region. The website even has downloadable data and enables you to create customized maps at national and local scales. One feature that would have made this website even better would have been a “watershed” layer that shows the watershed each waterway is part of. Another possible improvement would be to integrate this map with USGS databases on the peak stream flow, daily discharge, and flood frequency of waterways throughout the US. It would be interesting to investigate how these aspects compared with sedimentation TMDL or non point source pollution.

-Don Edmonds