Monitoring water quality in the Broad Run Watershed

Northern Virginia has been urbanizing considerably and there are many times more people that live here today than they did decades ago so that has an impact on water quality. The name of this project is the Broad Run Watershed Monitoring Program in Loudoun County Virginia and we are doing this project in collaboration with Loudoun Water and the goal of this project is to understand how water quality is changing within broad run there's plenty of things that end up in a river for example we have nutrients sediment road salt as well as forever chemicals like PFAS so we are collecting samples from the river and analyzing them to identify trends and potential exceedances of thresholds for these various pollutants we have kind of three groups working on this project. There are the field technicians who go out into the field and they collect the samples. We have the laboratory folks who are doing the laboratory analysis and then we have me and a student, Diver Marin, who is doing a lot of the computational work and digesting the data that's been collected in the field and analyzed in the laboratory in order for us to give guidance to the Loudoun water folks as to the status of Broad Run and the watershed. The experience of being part of this project has been amazing because I have had the opportunity to work with really amazing people, not just in the academic side as it is with my advisors and colleagues here at the lab, but also with people that come from the industry. Having good data as to salt concentrations or the concentrations of other compounds in a watershed is really important because it allows you to plan into the future. We are very fortunate in Northern Virginia to have utilities like Loudoun Water that are very proactive in monitoring and developing these long-term records because it allows them to plan for the future rather than react to it when a new guidance comes out or a new concern emerges, they will be ready to address it.