20141127 Ver 1_Emails_20141112

Baker, Virginia
From: Nimmer, Kimberly
Sent: Wednesday, November lZ'ZUl48:57AM
To: Baker, Virginia; Jennings, Heather
Subject: RE: measurable water quality parameters for mitigation site
Ginny,
| share your skepticism about how adequate and accurate the proposed method will be for demonstrating vvaterqua|ity
improvement and restoration success.
For the 319 grant program, success is all about removing streams from the 303d list by documenting improvements in
the parameters for which the stream was impaired. Knowing that this is usually a difficult, expensive, and long-term
effort, the program (nationally) has been looking for interim measures to document and highlight improvement. No
specific measures or techniques have been officially recommended. However, our program is trying to encourage
creative ways for projects to show improvement, especially recognizing how difficult this can be when constrained to a
3-year contract time period, which includes construction/project implementation time. This may not help your
situation, but we've even allowed the possibility of using photo documentation to document improvement (i.e., cows in
the stream before, cows fenced out after; visibly turbid stream during a storm event before, visibly clearer stream
during storm event after project implementation). This obviously does not provide quantified data, and couldn't help
with de|isting, but it can certainly show water quality has improved and perhaps point to where future monitoring
should occur.
With that said, some projects do conduct in stream monitoring, and the parameters sampled depend on what the
impairment/prob|emis. However, there isn't a standard monitoring plan that we require, so I'm not sure what to
recommend to the consultant you are currently working with.
Since Heather prepares our project success stories to submit to EPA, she may have additional insight or suggestions to
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From: Baker Virginia
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2014 4:29 PM

To: Nimmer, Kimberly; Jennings, Heather
Subject: measurable water quality parameters for mitigation site
Hi Kim and Heather,
I have taken over some of Eric Kulz's duties reviewing mitigation plans. There has been a trend in measuring ecological
uplift as a way to determine appropriate mitigation credit ratios and restoration techniques for streams. I just received a
mitigation plan that is proposing to use water quality measurements as a way of determining success.
The plan is to collect N, TP, FC, turbidity, temp, pH, DO and conductivity. They would like to consider the sustained
improvement over baseline of just two of these as a way of measuring success. Although this sounds good, I have too
much experience with measuring water quality in wetlands and playing around with statistics to know it is not really
adequate since just random measurements can show some improvement. They will be collecting too few samples to
really do statistics and only two parameter improvement as a measure of success sounds too few to me.
Have you either of have any experience with how improvement has been measured in impaired 319 streams? I was
talking to Steve Kroeger out at the lab about this and he suggested I contact you. I was looking for something that I
could recommend to this consultant to incorporate in their mitigation plan.
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1650 M,il Semlce Ceotet-
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Phooe -(WP) 707 -8788, Fix-(WP) 755 -1290