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Water Quality Monitoring

Oregon Department of Environmental Quality is responsible for keeping Oregon’s waters safe and healthy for many uses such as drinking, recreation and agriculture as well as for ensuring fish populations are able to thrive. Water Quality Monitoring provides critical information for understanding how well these goals are being met and for identifying emerging water quality concerns, planning wastewater and industrial permit limits, assessing compliance with environmental regulations, developing effective watershed pollution reduction strategies and understanding trends in water quality statewide.

Oregon DEQ’s Water Monitoring Program meets these needs by:

  • Planning and coordinating environmental data collection efforts to ensure the right data is collected to answer the question at hand.
  • Collecting representative, valid environmental data through physical, chemical and biological sampling and assessment.
  • Managing environmental data to ensure availability of accurate and complete data for agency programs and the general public.
  • Analyzing and interpreting water quality related data to produce reports which identify water quality conditions, identify threats to water quality

DEQ Water Quality Monitoring Strategy 2020

DEQ’s five-year monitoring strategy describes a comprehensive, statewide water monitoring and assessment program for providing high quality, publically accessible data, to address water quality program and statewide needs. The strategy outlines the chartered governance structure DEQ uses to propose, evaluate, prioritize and implement monitoring activities. It describes the status of existing monitoring programs and identifies internal and external strategic documents that influence the direction of DEQ’s monitoring programs. The strategy emphasizes the important role that monitoring partnerships play in providing needed monitoring data. It outlines the monitoring designs, indicators, quality assurance processes and data management systems required to provide and deliver the right information. Most importantly, the document looks at Oregon’s emerging water quality challenges to identify the information needed to understand Oregon’s emerging water quality concerns. 
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Contact

Karen Williams
Water Quality Monitoring manager, 
503-863-1664

Looking for data?

Visit our new Water Quality Monitoring Data page