Grant Puts Water Quality Online

By Bob Caylor, The News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Ind.

Nov. 15–Sometime next year, getting a closer look at the quality of surface water in the St. Joseph River watershed should be as close as your computer.

The St. Joseph River Watershed Initiative has received a $35,890 grant to make water-quality monitoring information available online.

The grant from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management will fund the creation of an Internet application that will allow anyone to retrieve water-quality data from the watershed initiative, the city of Fort Wayne and the Fort Wayne-Allen County Department of Health.

Jane Loomis, executive director of the watershed initiative, said she hopes the information will be available to a limited group of users by April, before it’s refined and made available to the general public later in 2008 through a link on www.sjrwi.org.

Information will be organized by time and by location and include measurements of water temperature, pH, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, E. coli and various pesticides and nutrients.

Historic as well as current data will be available and encompass 24 river and tributary sites in Indiana, Ohio and Michigan sampled weekly by the watershed initiative; three river sites sampled weekly by the city; and two ditch sites sampled by the health department.

All are located within the St. Joseph watershed. Supporters of the project include the city of Fort Wayne, Allen County, the Department of Biology at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne and Tetra Tech of Michigan.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Ind.

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