What are the implications of SPARROW results for modeling and monitoring?
|Back to Top| Development of hydrologic and water-quality models has progressed significantly over the last 20 years, resulting in improved broad-based assessments of water-quality conditions and improved the understanding of key factors and processes that affect water quality, such as land use, chemical sources of contamination, natural landscape features, and hydrologic transport. Success of the SPARROW model approach depends on: 1) accurate and spatially detailed information about the watershed including information about cropping patterns, urban populations, point source discharges, and animal manure management; 2) spatially extensive long-term water-quality data, coupled with streamflow data; and 3) continuing research and application of models that explicitly consider land and water processes and the way that they determine the downstream movement of pollutants. Unfortunately, water-quality monitoring by Federal and State agencies has declined remarkably. For example, during 1975
