Moody Lake Adaptive Management Water Quality Improvement Project

摘要

With limited funding available, maximizing water quality project efficiency is crucial in order to meet local community goals as well as state standards. Effectively targeting the highest loading sources are key. The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This can be widely observed in the field of watershed management where a large proportion of non-point source pollution originates from one or few areas or sites. In this presentation we use Moody Lake as an example of the value of investing in pre-project diagnostic monitoring as well as post-project effectiveness monitoring to maximize cost-benefits of water quality improvement projects. Intensive monitoring of tributary streams revealed that implementation in one wetland complex within the watershed could achieve approximately 80% of the watershed phosphorus load reductions needed for Moody Lake to meet water quality standards (mean summer phosphorus concentration of 40 μg/L), with a 25-year life cycle cost of just $38-53 per pound of phosphorus removed.