Enhanced source-water monitoring for New York City: historical framework, political context, and project design

Abstract

This document describes Phase I of the New York City monitoring project. The goals of the project are to create a quantitative baseline of selected physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of source-water streams and reservoirs for use in assessing future changes in the quality of NYC’s drinking water and the integrity of the associated aquatic ecosystems, include in the baseline factors that are sensitive to temporal variability, are reproducible, and lend themselves to analysis among sampling sites and times, integrate temporal and spatial change in both the level of selected contaminants and the structure and function of biological communities and ecosystems to assess whether impairment impacts the ability of the streams to provide ecosystem services, and to provide additional direction and perspective to the overall watershed management plan for the NYC source-water area.