Professor University of Tennessee Knoxville, Tennessee, United States
Abstract Submission: An Urban Waters Report Card (UWRC) has been completed by a state-wide working group effort consisting of Nashville Metro, the cities of Chattanooga, and Memphis, and counties of Hamilton, Shelby, and Knox. The Tennessee Water Resources Research Center promoted the effort with staff from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. The main goal of the UWRC to provide municipal separate storm sewer systems (MS4s) with an assessment tool that can incrementally quantify improvement trends in stream quality rather than solely relying on §303(d) based criteria. The UWRC provides MS4s communities common assessment protocols to “grade” watershed quality. A second goal is for UWRC grades to communicate to the public and municipal officials that are easily interpreted demonstrating improvements from stormwater control measures and stream restoration projects. The UWRC consists of four monitoring categories; they are: water quality, watershed hydrology, stream corridor, and community engagement. The stream corridor category consists of sub-categories for channel stability, physical habitat, and riparian connectivity. Monitoring data is compiled through relatively quickly methods including desktop obtained data, rapid field assessments, water sample analyses, continuous flow and temperature measurements, and public surveys. Through a collaborate effort by the working group and beta testing selected metrics within the categories, a final suite of metrics and performance criteria to grade a watershed as an A, B, C, D, or F, was completed. This presentation summaries the results of the beta testing for seven urban watersheds across Tennessee. A web-page was created and will also be presented.
Learning Objectives/Expected Outcome (Optional) : Advances in watershed monitoring and assessment tools; educating public and public officials on catchment-scale water quality improvements from SCMs.
