The water quality data displayed in this map has been collected by four groups of citizen scientists as part of the Citizen Science Monitoring for Pathogen Indicators in NY-NJ Harbor Tributaries project, funded by an agreement awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency to the New England Interstate Water Pollution Control Commission in partnership with the New York-New Jersey Harbor & Estuary Program.
Samples were analyzed for pathogen indicators (Enterococcus) and other water quality parameters June-August, 2014 in the following five watershed areas:
The purpose of this map is to make water quality data generated by citizen scientists widely available to a non-specialized audience, via a user-friendly, intuitive, interactive map. This map has been funded by an agreement awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency to the Hudson River Foundation for the New York-New Jersey Harbor & Estuary Program. Please refer to the Quality Assurance Project Plans for the data collection and map development [PDF] to fully understand the data quality and limitations.
The direct link for the map is www.urbanresearchmaps.org/HEPcitizenscience/map.html.
You can also view the monitoring locations on the Open Accessible Space Information System (OASIS) map.
This mapping application was developed by the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center / CUNY, by David Burgoon and Steven Romalewski, with funding support from the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program. The Center also helped with data management and spatial data configuration.
The mapped locations of the monitoring sites, the monitoring results, and the additional layers on the map are all stored in Google Drive. The basemap and all mapping functionality is provided via the Google Maps API.
The monitoring results and monitoring site locations were provided to US EPA by the citizen science groups for quality checking; EPA then provided these files to the Center for Urban Research for inclusion in the map. The additional mapped data layers were obtained by US EPA or the Harbor Estuary Program and also provided to the Center for mapping purposes.
You can download the data behind this site at these links; they'll take you to the Google Drive locations where you can view and download the files in CSV or KML format for your own mapping & analysis:
You can use the "Monitoring Location ID" field to join the results to the locations. The "Org ID" field in each table refers to the organization that collected the results, as follows:
The colors on the map for the monitoring locations are meant to provide a general sense of the relative concentration of enterococcus in individual samples. The colors do NOT indicate whether regulatory standards are being met for each specific water body.
The different levels are based on a number of national benchmarks for primary contact for recreation (EPA Ambient Water Quality Criteria for Bacteria [PDF] -- 1986).