“Using Exchange Network (EN) funds, we created a tribal consortium in Region 5 to adopt protocols for wild rice population assessments.

 

EN funding allowed all consortium tribes access to the Ambient Water Quality Management System (and its training and support staff), which we used to submit data to EPA's Water Quality Exchange (WQX). Our work provides an example of how tribes can collaborate to achieve shared goals and leverage funds to collect shared data, and to remove barriers to data submission through training.

 

Region 5 tribal water quality data that flows to WQX have improved greatly and included backlogs of past data; being part of the consortium allowed tribes with new staff or small-capacity monitoring programs to comply with the data reporting and water quality assessment requirements of their CWA 106 grants.”