MSU-Mankato Water Resources Center in the Mankato area will provide conventional pollutant monitoring at the following sites: Beauford Ditch, Big Cobb River, Blue Earth River, Le Sueur River (3), Little Cobb River, Minnesota River (2), Watonwan River.
This project goal is to conduct water chemistry monitoring at seventeen stream locations, to record and submit all data collected through this process, and to provide the information necessary for the calculation of water quality pollutant loads using the FLUX32 program.
The Winona County Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD) developed this project to help reduce the amount of pathogens and nutrients generated by livestock from reaching surface waters and groundwater by targeting feedlots located in areas that are highly susceptible to groundwater pollution and sinkhole formation.
The Faribault Soil and Water Conservation District will provide mini-grants to conservation-conscious community organizations who voluntarily construct best management practices that provide storage and treatment of stormwater runoff at its source.
The grant will use local data to develop stormwater planning options that prioritize, target, and measure the effectiveness of Best Management Practices and allow local city officials to make decisions on stormwater Best management Practices that reduce pollutants in the stormwatershed.
This project is the first step toward a regional based implementation approach to reduce phosphorus and total suspended solids in the 12 cities on the Mississippi River. By the time this project is approved, a stormwater retrofit analysis will be completed for the cities, and the MHB will be discussing with them a strategic way to implement the study on a regional scale. By funding this project, you are encouraging the future implementation in a strategic and organized process.
The AgBMP Loan Program provides needed funding for local implementation of clean water practices at an extremely low cost, is unique in its structure and is not duplicated by any other source of funding.The AgBMP loan program provides 3% loans through local lenders to farmers, rural landowners, and agriculture supply businesses.
The Aitkin County Soil and Water Conservation District will partner with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and local volunteers to conduct water quality monitoring in high priority areas of the Upper Mississippi River Grand Rapids Watershed. Five lakes will be sampled, including Savanna, Shumway, Loon, Hay, and Washburn. Through this effort we will obtain information that will be useful in assessing the health of this watershed. This will be valuable in planning for future restoration and protection efforts that will ensure good water and environmental quality for Aitkin County.
The goal of this project is to use the We Are Water MN exhibit and their technical knowledge in relationship-building and storytelling to increase community capacity for sustainable watershed management in the Cannon River, Cedar River, Mississippi-Headwaters, Mississippi-Grand Rapids, Mississippi-Twin Cities, Red Lake River, Rum River and St. Louis River watersheds.
This project will complete a Total Maximum Daily Load Implementation Plan for the watersheds of Big Sandy and Minnewawa Lakes. This restoration plan will provide pollution reduction and watershed management strategies that are developed with input from stakeholders in the watersheds.
The Blue Earth SWCD will be monitoring 7 stream sites located in the Le Sueur River Watershed. The stream sites will be monitored at the road crossing locations via bridge, culvert or shore. Onsite conditions will be recorded, water sample readings will be taken for Secchi tube, specific conductance, temperature, pH, DO, and photos taken.
With limited funds and limited staff time available for targeting critical service areas and implementing Best Management Practices (BMPs), Geographic Information System (GIS)-based tools that pinpoint locations where BMPs will have the highest effectiveness are increasingly important. The Blue Earth County/SWCD Watershed Implementation Targeting project will utilize LiDAR topographic data to determine areas of high importance for BMP implementation. The county is located in the Blue Earth, LeSueur, Watonwan and Middle Minnesota watersheds where there is a high density of impaired waters.
This project will conduct Inventory and Inspection of four drainage ditches in Blue Earth County: JD116, CD5, CD86 and CD56. The inventory of these drainage ditches is important in order to identify where erosion, sediment and/or nutrients contribute substantially to water quality degradation. The project will also prioritize sites for future side inlet control, buffer strip implementation, and/or storage and treatment implementation.
The goal of this project is to facilitate strategic networking, relationships, and learning in targeted groups to assess, build, and leverage community capacity (i.e. community resources and values) to increase knowledge of the Blue Earth River watershed’s water resources and increase best management practice (BMP) adoption to restore and protect water quality in the Blue Earth River watershed. Additional goals include providing information that is readily available to the general public for updates on Watershed Approach work in the Blue Earth River watershed.
Carlton County Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD), Carlton County Planning and Zoning, and local volunteers will lead an effort to collect Total Phosphorus, Chlorophyll-A, and secchi disc transparency data for the MPCA Surface Water Assessment Grant (SWAG) project on following six lakes: Eagle Lake, Upper (North) Island Lake, Lower (South) Island Lake, Tamarack Lake, Cole Lake, and Cross Lake.
The Conservation Dashboard will provide the Carlton Soil and Water Conservation District, its water plan, and local landowners a system to target, prioritize, and measure resource needs and effective conservation implementation within the subwatersheds of Carlton County. The Dashboard will identify where data gaps exist, translate the data in a way that partners and landowners easily understand, and insert Best Management Practice recommendations onto the county webmapping tool, used by citizens.
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.
The LeSueur River has been identified as one of the leading contributors of sediment to the Minnesota River. A majority of this sediment has been determined to come from the banks, bluffs and ravines located along the river. This project focuses on a one mile reach of the LeSueur River where stream channel migration and mass wasting are significantly eroding four bluffs. Two township roads and many houses are in danger of falling into the river.
The St. Cloud Waste Water Treatment Facility (SCWWTF) is currently conducting long term planning for future biosolids management. The most likely path forward includes dewatering of the digested biosolids, which will produce a supernatant stream with significant phosphorus and ammonia loads that would be returned to the liquids treatment portion of the WWTF. Returning these nutrient loads to the liquids train would result in increases to effluent concentrations, increases in power consumption, or both.
This project will identify and compile existing nitrate data from groundwaters and surface waters in the Lower Mississippi Basin (LMB) generally and focus on the Root River Watershed. The purpose is to investigate the quantity and quality of existing nitrate data, and to organize it for use in comprehensive watershed strategy development (including assessment, TMDL computation and identification and study of nitrate sources and delivery mechanisms).
This project will provide additional monitoring data to be utilized in the watershed assessment process for the Le Sueur River Watershed Project. Blue Earth County SWCD will provide a technician to complete the water sampling for the sampling years 2011 and 2012 on the Maple River.
This project will support a civic engagement cohort that will be offered in southwest Minnesota to foster partnering and build capacity of local government, organizations, and residents for effective civic engagement in water protection and restoration. This project will also build networks and the skill set of local resource professionals to do effective civic engagement work for water restoration and protection. The cohort will be administered through the Minnesota River Board (MRB), established in 1995 with a goal of focusing water management efforts on the local level.
This project will develop an understanding for how sediment sources change over timescales of individual storm events as well as over the past two centuries. The results will be used by the larger Collaborative for Sediment Source Reduction (CISSR)-Blue Earth research group to establish a sediment budget for the Greater Blue Earth River Basin and understand the effectiveness of various potential mitigation strategies. In addition, these results can be used by MPCA and others to calibrate watershed sediment models.
This project will provide Agency staff, local partners and the citizen volunteers with a framework for building local capacity to design civic engagement and communication / outreach efforts. This will contribute to meaningful and sustained public participation in surface water protection and restoration activities throughout the watershed. MPCA staff, local partners and citizen volunteers will also be able to integrate the results of the biophysical and community assessment into strategies for improving water bodies on the MN 303d List of Impaired Waters
This project will build network and the skill set of local resource professionals to do effective civic engagement work for water restoration and protection in Southeast Minnesota. The cohort will be administered through the Southeast Minnesota Water Resources Board (SE MN WRB) which is an area wide Joint Powers Board (JPB) established to help improve and protect the water resources of the area through coordinating local water planning efforts. This JPB has successfully administered water quality grants in the past that have positively impacted the water resources of this region.
This project will complete spatial and temporal revisions , recalibration and validation of 7 watershed HSPF models. These fully functioning calibrated validated executable models will simulate hydrology, sediment (sand, silt, and clay), temperature, phosphorus, nitrogen, dissolved oxygen, biochemical oxygen demand, and algae at the 12-digit HUC subbasin scale (or finer).
The goal of this protect is to protect the water quality of the Mississippi River at Winona, MN through the installation of a downtown Winona parking lot rain garden.
The Drinking Water Contaminants of Emerging Concern (CEC) program identifies environmental contaminants for which current health-based standards currently do not exist or need to be updated, investigate the potential for human exposure to these chemicals, and develop guidance values for drinking water. Contaminants evaluated by CEC staff include contaminants that have been released or detected in Minnesota waters (surface water and groundwater) or that have the potential to migrate to or be detected in Minnesota waters.
The goal of this project is to construct, calibrate, and validate five Hydrologic Simulation Program FORTRAN (HSPF) watershed models. The outcome will be HSPF models that can readily be used to provide information to support conventional parameter TMDLs. These models will generate predicted output timeseries for hydrology, sediment, nutrients, and dissolved oxygen which are consistent with available sets of observed data.
The Greater Blue Earth River Basin Alliance is a Joint Powers Organization consisting of nine member Counties and Soil and Water Conservation Districts encompassing the Blue Earth, Le Sueur and Watonwan River Watersheds. This project will enable the Alliance to continue to provide staff and add capacity in the areas of technical assistance, education and outreach.
Provide education, outreach and civic engagement necessary for the development of structural and non-structural best management practices needed to improve water quality within the Greater Blue Earth River Basin. General Education will have a regional focus to landowners. Outreach effort will be focused on regional officials, staff and landowners. Civic engagement efforts will have a smaller watershed scale focus with efforts resulting in structural BMPs being placed on the land and non-structural BMPs being adopted. Implementation of structural best management practices on the land.
The purpose of this project is to develop a framework to implement best management practices (BMPs) on ditches in headwater areas utilizing a partnership between drainage staff and the Greater Blue Earth River Basin Alliance (GBERBA). By replacing failing side-inlets with an alternative design, we can make strides towards our water quality and water quantity goals. The alternative inlets serve to prevent sediment and phosphorus from washing downstream and the design can also alleviate peak flows by temporarily storing stormwater.
This project will sample and monitor 18 sites for chemical, physical and bacteriological parameters for two years in coordination with the 2015-16 Surface Water Assessment Grant (SWAG) work plan proposal. Headwaters Science Center (HSC) will be the project lead and recruit volunteer students from Trek North, Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig, and Deer Lake high schools as well as to two AmeriCorps volunteer crews. An experienced Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) environmental scientist will be the project lead responsible for oversight and full compliance to MPCA protocols.
The goal of this project is to construct, calibrate, and validate a watershed model using HSPF. RESPEC will produce a HSPF model that can readily be used to provide information to support conventional parameter TMDLs.
The goal of this project is to extend the existing HSPF models through 2012 in the Chippewa Watershed (07020005) and Hawk-Yellow Medicine Watershed (07020004) to incorporate recent monitoring data to support current MPCA business needs and sediment source investigations.
This project will complete spatial and temporal revisions of 6 Hydrologic Simulation Program FORTRAN (HSPF) models, the recalibration and validation of 7 watershed HSPF models, and the revision of the drainage network and point source representation of the Pomme de Terre HSPF model.
The Minnesota River Basin Hydrological Simulation Program FORTRAN (HSPF) models, which simulate flow and pollutant transport, need to be refined to be consistent with the most recent external sources of land use, hydrologic response, and surface flow attributions. The primary goal of this work is to refine the hydrologic calibration in the Minnesota River basin.
"This proposal is to monitor all MPCA target streams and lake sites in the Upper Mississippi Grand Rapids watershed located within Itasca County. Itasca County SWCD has been working collaboratively with MPCA in its intensive watershed monitoring effort on a number of grants to assess the overall health of our water resources and to identify waters with impairments along with those in need of additional protection to prevent future impairments.
Faribault County Soil and Water Conservation District will develop two watershed plans using charettes, an intensive planning process used to engage citizens, conservation agencies, and others to collaborate on a vision for the development of a drainage watershed scale plan. The process allows landowners, producers, businesses, townships, cities and the county to partake in a comprehensive plan directly relating back to concerns and solutions related to surface water and nonpoint source pollution.
