Tools – Upper Iowa River

Water Sampling Season Begins

Ross Evelsizer of Northeast Iowa RC&D measures water temperature & pH at Silver Creek. It's spring in Northeast Iowa--time again to begin collecting samples for water quality analysis. Since 2004, volunteers have been going out once a month from April to November to collect samples at 30 locations along the Upper Iowa River and its tributaries. Sample collectors measure water temperature, pH, and transparency in the field. The samples are then sent to Coe College where they are tested for concentrations of e. coli, nitrogen, chloride, and phosphorus. The data is made available on the Upper Iowa River [...]

Online Tools: The Daily Erosion Project

The Daily Erosion Project (DEP) estimates precipitation, runoff, sheet and rill erosion, and hillslope delivery in near real time, on over 2000 watersheds in the Midwest (Figure 1). It does this by running the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model with a combination of remotely-sensed precipitation weather stations, remotely-sensed crop and residue cover, remotely-sensed topography, and soils databases. It is an update and expansion to the Iowa Daily Erosion Project (Cruse et al., 2006) that is designed to further investigate large scale erosion dynamics while maintaining hillslope level input resolution. The DEP has a climate database extending from 2007 to [...]