Water Quality
The International Souris River Board (ISRB) has a mandate to annually report on compliance with Water Quality Objectives (WQOs), review existing WQOs every five years and develop new recommendations regarding water-quality objectives. This proposal addresses the ISRB mandate, as a comprehensive review of objectives is overdue in part due to a lack of supporting information. This project, over the course of two years, will fill a critical knowledge gap on the status and trends of water quality in rivers and creeks within the Souris River Watershed in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and North Dakota. This knowledge is fundamental to the process of updating water quality objectives at the two Souris River border crossing locations and to inform a watershed approach for identifying risks to water quality and management approaches to water delivery under the International Agreement. Similar to the effort currently being done for the Red River Basin through IWI funding under the International Red River Board (IRRB), a basin-wide water-quality trend analysis for the Souris River Basin (Basin) will be performed by the USGS using R-QWTREND (a software developed by the USGS for water quality trend estimation) for up to 34 sites (includes 2 binational sites) and 12 of the 23 constituents for which water-quality objectives (WQOs) have been set. Results and lessons learned from the IRRB effort will be applied to this ISRB project.
ECCC, Manitoba Sustainable Development, Saskatchewan Water Security Agency, North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality