Citizen Nomination of State Surface Waters for Inclusion in Annual Water Quality Monitoring Plan
During the 1997 legislative session, the General Assembly enacted the Water Quality Monitoring, Information, and Restoration Act (WQMIRA). WQMIRA directs DEQ to provide a procedure for citizens of the Commonwealth to nominate portions of lakes, streams, and rivers of Virginia for water quality monitoring by DEQ.
During the 2007 legislative session, the General Assembly changed the schedule for nominations. This was due to a change by DEQ from a state fiscal to a calendar monitoring year. Citizens can send their nominations to DEQ via the procedures described in the file below. Nominations received by April 30 of each year will be considered for inclusion beginning in January of the following year.For the 2008 monitoring year, DEQ received 22 nominations for individual streams, lakes, and other waterbodies. Many of these nominations included data collected by citizen monitoring groups. This monitoring data helped DEQ staff to select the most appropriate follow-up sites. The nominations fell into two categories.
- Chemical- Requests sampling for parameters such as dissolved oxygen, pH, nutrients, and dissolved metals. In addition, DEQ will routinely monitor for E. coli bacteria at these sites.
- Biological- Requests sampling for benthic macroinvertebrates. Benthic macroinvertebrates are insects and other animals living in the sediment that can be seen without using a microscope.
The staff at DEQ reviewed each nomination to determine if a monitoring station could be established at or near a nominated site. As a result, DEQ will monitor within 16 of the 22 nominated waterbodies.
Below are two documents that summarize how DEQ evaluates the citizen nominations. The first document compares the latest round of citizen nominations to the previous six years of nominations. The second document lists the latest round of nominations received with those that will receive follow-up monitoring by DEQ.
House Bill 1859: December 2007 Update
In 2002, the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation that established the Virginia Citizen Water Quality Monitoring Program in the Code of Virginia (§62.1-44.19:11). During the 2007 General Assembly, House Bill 1859 was passed that amended the Code to include, “It shall be the goal of the Department to encourage citizen water quality monitoring so that 3,000 stream miles are monitored by volunteer citizens by 2010."
Based on citizen data submitted and incorporated into the 2008 305(b)/303(d) Integrated Water Quality Assessment Report, DEQ estimates 2,592 miles were monitored by citizen groups. This estimate is based on conservatively assigning an average of three stream miles per citizen station. A revised tally will be available when the 2008 305(b)/303(d) Report is completed in the spring of 2008 and is approved by EPA.
Citizen Group Name* | Number of Monitoring Sites | Estimated Number of Stream Miles Credited (average 3 miles per station) |
| Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay | 123 | 369 |
| Audubon Naturalist Society | 22 | 66 |
Chesapeake Bay Governors School | 12 | 36 |
Clean Virginia Waterways | 21 | 63 |
Environmental Alliance for Senior Involvement | 1 | 3 |
Four Mile Run Volunteers | 10 | 30 |
Friends of Blacks Run | 15 | 45 |
Friends of Shenandoah River | 157 | 471 |
Goose Creek Association | 22 | 66 |
Highlands Soil and Water Conservation District | 10 | 30 |
Historic Green Springs Inc. | 7 | 21 |
John Marshall Soil and Water Conservation District | 10 | 30 |
Lake Anna Civic Association | 28 | 0** |
Lord Fairfax Soil and Water Conservation District | 12 | 36 |
Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy | 42 | 126 |
Mattaponi and Pamunkey Rivers Association | 13 | 39 |
McClure River Restoration Project | 13 | 39 |
Opequon Watershed Inc. | 25 | 75 |
Randolph Macon College | 12 | 36 |
RappFLOW | 19 | 57 |
Shenandoah Resource Conservation and Development | 18 | 54 |
StreamWatch | 41 | 123 |
Sweet Briar College | 6 | 18 |
Timberlake Homeowners Association | 11 | 9** |
Upper Tennessee River Roundtable | 9 | 27 |
Virginia Save Our Streams | 241 | 723 |
Totals | 900 | 2,592 |
* Groups represented in this table provided Level II or Level III quality data. Level I data are not included in the tally.
** Legislative goal tracks stream and river miles. Stations in lakes are not tallied in this table.
Citizen Monitoring and DEQ Water Quality Monitoring Stations
To learn more about the locations of the citizen monitoring sites identified by DEQ along with real time data collected at DEQ monitoring sites, click the 'Virginia DEQ Geographic Environmental Mapping System' link below. From this page, you can select the mapping application you wish to view. Both the 'What's in My Backyard' and the '2006 Impaired Waters' maps show the locations of monitoring stations used for the 2006 305(b)/303(d) Water Quality Assessment. There will be similar links for future assessments. For dial-up users, these pages may take a long time to load. Users who are unfamiliar with using a web based GIS application, please review the help web page.
In partnership with the Virginia Water Monitoring Council (VWMC), DEQ is developing a GIS application to show where citizen groups, private industry, government agencies, and other organizations are monitoring for water quality. This website is operational and there will be regular updates to the site. By clicking the 'VWMC Community Monitoring Efforts in Virginia' link below, you can access a map displaying organizations that have registered on the VWMC website. Navigation on this map is very similar to the DEQ GIS application.
To learn more about the VWMC, please go to http://www.VirginiaWMC.org.