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Water: Monitoring & Assessment

Volunteer Lake Monitoring: A Methods Manual

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Increasingly, state, local, and federal agencies are finding that citizen volunteers are valuable partners in programs to monitor and protect our nation's water resources. Among the most developed and widespread of these programs are those that monitor existing or potential lake pollution problems.

The EPA has developed Volunteer Lake Monitoring: A Methods Manual (PDF) (65 pages, 868KB) to present specific information on volunteer lake water quality monitoring methods. It is intended both for the organizers of the lake volunteer monitoring program, and for the volunteer who will actually be sampling lake conditions. Its emphasis is on identifying appropriate parameters to monitor and setting out specific steps for each selected monitoring methods. Careful quality assurance/quality control procedures are advocated throughout this manual to ensure that the data collected by volunteers are useful to States and other agencies.


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