This project will work with the MPCA to conduct watershed pollutant load monitoring at four sites in the Chippewa River watershed and one site in the neighboring Pomme de Terre River watershed . The Chippewa River Watershed Project (CRWP) team will also aid the MPCA in measuring and comparing regional differences and long-term trends in water quality. The goal is to collect quality data and complete load calculations for the five sites using the MPCA's established protocols.
Wabasha Soil and Water Conservation District, in conjunction with Wabasha Natural Resources Conservation Service field office and Farm Service Agency field office, will complete 75 compliance checks and writing or rewriting Highly Erodable Lands plans throughout Wabasha county. Technical staff, upon completion, will partner with landowners to coordinate potential future funding to increase conservation on the land and increase water quality in streams and groundwater through Best Management Practices placement.
The Pomme de Terre River Association has targeted and identified specific areas and activities required for marked water quality improvement. This project will implement of 16 Water and Sediment Control Basins (WASCOBs), 28 Rain Gardens, 2 Shoreline/ Stream bank stabilization, 10 Waste Pit Closures, 1 Terrace Project, and the enrollment of 1900 acres into conservation practices. These practices in total will directly result in site-specific and watershed-dependent reductions of 17,801 tons of sediment and 17,784 pounds of phosphorous from entering surface waters yearly in the watershed.
These funds are being used to systematically collect data and produce statistically valid estimates of the rate of soil erosion and tracking the adoption of high residue cropping systems in in the 67 counties with greater than 30% land in agricultural row crop production. Designed to establish a long term program in Minnesota to collect data and produce county, watershed, and state wide estimates of soil erosion caused by water and wind along with tracking adoption of conservation measures to address erosion.
The goal of the Pomme de Terre River Association (JPB) is to improve the local water resources within the watershed through targeted voluntary efforts and the building of strong relationships with local landowners, producers, and citizens. The Pomme de Terre River is currently not meeting state water quality for sediment. The purpose of this project is to strategically work towards a 53% sediment reduction goal at the mouth of the Pomme de Terre River based on a Watershed Restoration and Protection Strategy document.
These funds are being used to systematically collect data and produce statistically valid estimates of the rate of soil erosion and tracking the adoption of high residue cropping systems in counties with greater than 30% land in agricultural row crop production. Designed to establish a long term program in Minnesota to collect data and produce county, watershed, and state wide estimates of soil erosion caused by water and wind along with tracking adoption of conservation measures to address erosion.
This project will fully fund three Nonpoint Engineering Assistance (NPEA) Joint Powers Board positions in cooperation with the NPEA Base Funding anticipated at $130,000 per year. This will allow a 2nd Professional Engineer to be retained in addition to a Lead Engineer and Technician. This 'accelerated' engineering previously was funded with BWSR Challenge Grants, and an EPA319 grant with corresponding BWSR CWF Matching Grant to handle the high workload associated with the large number of BWSR feedlot cost-share projects approved in South East Minnesota.
This project will extend two Feedlot Technical positions initially created and funded by a FY2011 CWF Feedlot Water Quality Grant that assess and help fix animal waste runoff from small feedlots. The technicians will work with and under the Technical Authority and priorities of the South East Soil and Water Conservation District Tech Support JPB lead Engineer. This project will enable more projects to be constructed resulting in a reduction of nitrogen, phosphorus and fecal coliform runoff into surface and ground water in South East Minnesota and the Mississippi River.
The Accelerated Water Quality Project Implementation Program will increase the connection between landowners, local government units and the landscape to accelerate efforts addressing non-point source loading to surface waters throughout the Red River Valley Conservation Service Area.
A direct appropriation of $400,000 in FY 2010 for the Anoka Conservation District (ACD) is for the metropolitan landscape restoration program for water quality and improvement projects in the seven-county metro area (the law also provides $600,000 for this purpose in FY2011).
A direct appropriation of $400,000 in FY 2010 and $600,000 in FY2011 for the Anoka Conservation District (ACD) is for the metropolitan landscape restoration program for water quality and improvement projects in the seven-county metro area.
The Washington Conservation District (WCD), Washington County, and South Washington Watershed District (SWWD) are partnering to retrofit water quality improvement practices at the Oakdale Library. The goal is clean water and the project will work toward the 101 pound phosphorus load reduction target for Armstrong Lake identified in the SWWD Watershed Plan. The project will also benefit Wilmes Lake, which is downstream from Armstrong and is impaired by excess nutrients.
This project will provide condition monitoring and problem investigation monitoring at the following sites.
Mississippi River: Tributaries include Bassett Creek, Cannon River, Crow River, and Minnehaha Creek.
Minnesota River: Tributaries include Eagle Creek,Riley Creek, and Valley Creek tributary to the St. Croix River
Working with the Metropolitan Council, the University of Minnesota - Minnesota Technical Assistance Program (MnTAP) is investigating the opportunity for water conservation by private industrial water users across the Twin Cities metropolitan region. Private industrial water users are defined as industries that use private wells for their water supply. This work is determining factors that encourage or create barriers for implementation of identified industrial water conservation opportunities.
The Beltrami SWCD proposes to partner with citizen and non-profit groups to complete projects that will reduce stormwater runoff and retain water on the land. The majority of the projects will be in the Lake Bemidji lakeshed which has recently been identified in the WRAPs project as being on the verge of impaired for nutrients. With the City of Bemidji being a regional hub for Northwestern Minnesota and the First City on the Mississippi, there are ample opportunities for citizen involvement and ample opportunities for stormwater improvements.
Beltrami County will be updating their water plan in 2017. This plan will be watershed protection oriented and will utilize all available data and maps in order to best protect our water resources. In 2012, Beltrami County completed screening on 19 of our large lakes with heavy land use development. What we found was that none of the lakes had enough chemical data for a trend analysis.
This project will focus, on a sub-regional scale, on water quality improvements targeted at concentrated runoff flows generated from upstream, developed portions of the City of Forest Lake. This project will work to modify an existing wetland complex located in publicly owned Bixby Park of Forest Lake to increase water quality treatment potential and storage capacity. The project will also incorporate an innovative iron-enhanced sand filter which will remove dissolved phosphorus, resulting in a 206 pound/year reduction of phosphorous and a 27 tons/year removal of sediment.
In recent years, nutrient enrichment has occurred in Lake St. Croix due to increasing amounts of phosphorus entering the lake from the watershed. According to the TMDL, approximately half of the phosphorus-loading to Lake St. Croix is in the soluble form, and agriculture has been identified as one of the largest contributors of that phosphorus. In addition to the TMDL, subwatershed analyses were completed to identify, assess, and prioritize phosphorus-reducing practices in rural areas draining to Lake St. Croix in Washington County. This project will reduce phosphorus discharges to the St.
This project will develop a watershed approach plan, including impaired waters allocations, for the Mustinka Watershed, located at the headwaters of the Red River of the North, in western Minnesota, lying partly in Grant, Stevens, Ottertail, Big Stone, and Traverse counties. The watershed approach plan will set water quality goals for the watershed, recommend allocations for achieving total maximum daily loads where waters do not meet state standards and are listed as impaired.
This project proposes the implementation of 10 best management practices identified as having the lowest cost-benefit ratio as it relates to phosphorus reduction to downstream Moody and Bone Lakes with an estimated reduction to watershed phosphorus loads to Bone Lake by 90 pounds per year and to Moody Lake by 24 pounds per year. The Bone Lake watershed is at the ?top? of the larger watershed, making it an ideal location to begin work that will have direct improvements downstream.
Bone Lake and upstream Moody Lake are the headwaters of the Comfort Lake-Forest Lake Watershed District northern flow network, and as such, their water quality sets the stage for downstream waters, particularly Comfort Lake, the Sunrise River, and ultimately Lake St. Croix. This project proposes the implementation of six wetland restorations located along the tributary identified as the single highest source of phosphorus loading to Bone Lake. These wetland restorations are estimated to reduce watershed phosphorus loads to Bone Lake by 50 pounds per year.
Brown's Creek Watershed District, the MN DNR Trails and Countryside Auto Repair will partner to achieve significant thermal and sediment reductions in the biologically impaired Brown's Creek by installing one large scale rain garden with infiltration, one pretreatment chamber for sediment capture off of parking and drive lanes, and a two cell bio-filtration garden. The entire project site is intensely utilized, drains untreated water to Brown's Creek, and is located on the developing Brown's Creek State Trail.
Brown's Creek Watershed District (BCWD) has identified this project as a part of the Brown's Creek TMDL Implementation. The identified untreated residential development in Stillwater directly contributes stormwater to Brown's Creek, a DNR designated trout stream currently impaired for turbidity and lack of cold water assemblage. The main stressors for Brown's Creek are total suspended solids and thermal loading.
Brown's Creek is one of the few remaining cold water fisheries in the Metropolitan Area; however, it is impaired due to high suspended solids and high water temperatures. To understand the extensive and complex in-stream temperature and local climate data already collected by the Brown's Creek Watershed District, this grant will facilitate the development of a thermal model to determine thermal sources and cost-effective management projects and practices to reduce thermal loading to Brown's Creek.
The Watershed District is partnering with the City of Stillwater to reduce sediment and thermal loading to Brown's Creek from existing impervious gravel parking lot and paved roads to achieve Total Maximum Daily Load water quality goals in this reach of Brown's Creek.
The purpose of the project is to target the type and location of riparian vegetation restoration needed to shade three miles of unforested buffer on Brown's Creek, a metro area trout stream impaired for thermal and sediment loading. The project will conduct a riparian shading analysis, cost-benefit analysis, and modeling of restoration scenarios based on field measurements of shade in the unforested buffer of Brown's Creek.
Brown's Creek is the namesake of Brown's Creek Watershed District (BCWD) and a designated metro trout stream. But in recent years the stream hasn't been home to as many trout and cold-water insects as we would hope. The creek is too warm and too muddy.
Funds are to be used to protect, enhance and restore water quality in lakes, rivers and streams and to protect groundwater and drinking water. Activities include structural and vegetative practices to reduce runoff and retain water on the land, feedlot water quality projects, SSTS abatement grants for low income individuals, and stream bank, stream channel and shoreline protection projects. For the fiscal year 2012, BWSR awarded 12 local governments with funds.
This project addresses the identified need for an Implementation Plan that provides an overall roadmap for the effort it will take to meet the Carnelian Marine St. Croix Multi-Lakes Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL). An Implementation Plan will be developed, with involvement of the Project Partners and stakeholder groups, that sets forth prioritized strategies for attaining the TMDL and a method for tracking the progress of those efforts. The Implementation Plan will be restoration-focused, but will include protection-oriented information/actions as well.
This project will implement watershed load reduction practices to restore the top priority water body in the Carnelian Marine St. Croix Watershed District in northeast Washington County. Recently completed prioritization and targeting efforts have identified several Best Management Practice opportunities around goose Lake, the number one priority for implementation practices.
Continued TMDL project to support next phases associated with completion of TMDL's for ten lakes in the Carnelian Marine Saint Croix Watershed District (CMSCWD). Ten lakes are; East Boot, Fish, Goose, Hay, Jellum’s, Long, Loon, Louise, Mud and South Twin.
This monitoring project includes lake and stream monitoring and encompasses all of Cass County, and surrounding counties. The project will obtain water quality data for streams; in 2009, lakeshed assessments indicated that many surface waters throughout the county were data deficient. This project will address the need for sufficient data on a county-wide basis and fulfill the State’s intensive watershed monitoring program goals by obtaining water quality data at targeted lake and stream sites.
This project will include lake and stream monitoring on 23 lakes and 4 streams found within the Leech Lake River and Pine River watersheds in Cass County. The project will be conducted in an effort to gain sufficient data on these data-deficient lake and stream sites within these watersheds. All of the proposed monitoring sites are target sites located in the targeted watersheds for 2012. Cass ESD is partnering with Hubbard SWCD, the Leech Lake Band of Objibwe, and RMB Environmental Laboratories to conduct the fieldwork for this project.
A cooperative study was conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Metropolitan Council, and the Minnesota Department of Health to assess groundwater and surface-water interactions in lakes in the northeast Twin Cities Metropolitan Area (TCMA), including White Bear Lake. An important product of the study was the creation of a groundwater-flow model focused on the northeast TCMA. The groundwater flow model is available for future use to assess the effects of groundwater withdrawals on lake levels as well as to describe other groundwater and surface-water interactions.
The purpose of this project is to create a shared plan for the Watershed Restoration and Protection Strategy (WRAPS) process with roles, responsibilities, commitments and deliverables clearly understood by all (Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), Chippewa River Watershed, and local partners). The MPCA and the Chippewa River Watershed Project (CRWP) will be working together to ascertain the level of involvement that local units of government and other partners want to engage in for the second round of the WRAPS process.
This project will complete a comprehensive and sustainable Major Watershed Restoration and Protection Strategies report for the Chippewa River, its tributary streams, and the many lakes in the Chippewa River watershed that is understandable and adoptable by local units of government and residents.
The goal of the Chippewa River Watershed Protection project is to protect unimpaired areas of the watershed. This will be accomplished through education and outreach with landowners and through implementation of best management practices.
The Villa Park Wetland Restoration Project proposes sediment removal from 6 contiguous stormwater wetland treatment cells within the Villa Park Wetland system resulting in an additional 118lbs/yr of total phosphorus(TP) removal from water entering Lake McCarrons.
The City of Forest Lake will install four biofiltration basins and a wet sedimentation pond to treat stormwater prior to discharge into Clear Lake. Clear Lake is identified as a priority lake within the Rice Creek Watershed District's (RCWD) Watershed Management Plan and does not meet the nutrient goals established by the RCWD. Mid-summer algae blooms are common and occasionally severe enough to impact recreation.
