Document: AMA-3-62-4

Developing national nutrient criteria.

PARKER, A.*, R.CANTILLI, D.FLEMER, G.GIBSON, D.HART and L.PARKER

USEPA, Washington, DC 20460 ¹

Abstract:
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began a National program in 1998 that provides guidance to States and Tribes in developing nutrient criteria, as directed by the President's Clean Water Action Plan (1998). This program is tasked with publishing waterbody-specific technical guidance manuals for numeric nutrient criteria development in lakes and reservoirs, rivers and streams, estuaries and coastal waters, and wetlands. The program will also develop default criteria for the fourteen delineated nutrient ecoregions of the US. Technical guidance manuals for lakes and reservoirs, and rivers and streams will be finalized in February and March 2000. Expert workgroups have been formed to draft the coastal and estuaries, and the wetlands technical guidance manuals. Waterbody-specific default criteria ranges developed by the National Nutrient Team will be published in Fall 2000 for lakes and reservoirs, and rivers and streams in eight nutrient ecoregions, and for wetlands in one nutrient ecoregion. The default criteria ranges will be developed using national, State, and Tribal datasets. Seed data for analyses include EPA STORET (STORage and RETrieval) water quality data; USGS NAWQA (NAtional Water Quality Assessment program), HBN (Hydrologic Benchmark Network), and NASQAN (NAtional Stream Quality Accounting Network). The 17 criteria documents will be published as appendices to the technical guidance manuals and will be available for public comment in Fall 2000.

Keywords: nutrient criteria, EPA, Clean Water Action Plan

This abstract is being presented at: 8:30 AM in session:
Oral Session #70: Aquatic Ecology.