Baseline Water Quality Data Inventory and Analysis, Padre Island National Seashore

National Park Service

The National Park Service's (NPS) Organic Act of 1916 states that the mission of the NPS is to promote and regulate the use of national parks, monuments, and other units "... to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such a manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." One task embodied by this mission is preserving and protecting water resources and water dependent environments in parks. Ensuring the integrity of park water quality, due to its importance in sustaining natural, aquatic park ecosystems and supporting human consumptive and recreational use, is fundamental to successfully addressing this task. The first step in ensuring the integrity of park water quality is defining historic and extant water quality. This document represents one product of an ongoing effort by the NPS Water Resources Division (WRD) and the Servicewide Inventory and Monitoring Program to characterize baseline water quality using existing data at park units containing significant natural resources. This effort was initiated in 1993 by the award of a contract to Horizon Systems Corporation to retrieve, format, and analyze surface water quality data from the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Storage and Retrieval (STORET) database system. The scope of work identified in the Request For Proposals outlined several sequential, interrelated project phases, including, but not limited to: (1) determining the water quality retrieval/query area around each park; (2) downloading and assessing the quality of the data from STORET; (3) generating basic water quality summary statistics and graphic plots; (4) reformatting water quality data for compatibility with the park-based Water Quality Data Management System presently underdevelopment; and (5) providing recommendations concerning possible hardware, software, and personnel options for storing combined park databases in a centralized NPS water quality database. This report documents the results of phases one through four of this effort for this park unit. In particular, this document provides: (1) a complete inventory of all retrieved water quality parameter data, water quality stations, and the entities responsible for data collection; (2) descriptive statistics and appropriate graphical plots of water quality data characterizing period of record, annual, seasonal central tendencies and trends; (3) a comparison of the park's water quality data to relevant EPA and WRD water quality screening criteria; and (4) an Inventory Data Evaluation and Analysis (IDEA) to determine what Servicewide Inventory and Monitoring Program "Level I" water quality parameters have been measured within the study area. Accompanying the report are disks containing digital copies of all data used in the report, as well as all components of the report (tables, figures, etc.).

Baseline Water Quality Data Inventory and Analysis, Padre Island National Seashore

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