Global Policy Laboratory, Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.
National Center for Environmental Economics, US Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., USA.
Sci Data. 2022 Aug 27;9(1):524. doi: 10.1038/s41597-022-01650-6.
Water quality monitoring can inform policies that address pollution; however, inconsistent measurement and reporting practices render many observations incomparable across bodies of water, thereby impeding efforts to characterize spatial patterns and long-term trends in pollution. Here, we harmonized 9.2 million publicly available monitor readings from 226 distinct water monitoring authorities spanning the entirety of the Mississippi/Atchafalaya River Basin (MARB) in the United States. We created the Standardized Nitrogen and Phosphorus Dataset (SNAPD), a novel dataset of 4.8 million standardized observations for nitrogen- and phosphorus-containing compounds from 107 thousand sites during 1980-2018. To the best of our knowledge, this dataset represents the largest record of these pollutants in a single river network where measurements can be compared across time and space. We addressed numerous well-documented issues associated with the reporting and interpretation of these water quality data, heretofore unaddressed at this scale, and our approach to water quality data processing can be applied to other nutrient compounds and regions.
水质监测可以为解决污染问题提供政策依据；然而，由于测量和报告实践不一致，使得许多观测结果在不同水体之间无法比较，从而阻碍了对污染的空间格局和长期趋势进行特征描述。在这里，我们协调了来自美国密西西比河/阿查法拉亚河流域（MARB）226 个不同水质监测机构的 920 万份公开可用的监测读数。我们创建了标准化氮磷数据集（SNAPD），这是一个包含 107000 个地点在 1980 年至 2018 年期间的含氮和含磷化合物的 480 万标准化观测结果的新数据集。据我们所知，这个数据集代表了在一个单一的河网中这些污染物的最大记录，在这个河网中可以跨时间和空间进行比较测量。我们解决了许多与这些水质数据的报告和解释相关的、迄今为止在这个规模上尚未解决的问题，我们的水质数据处理方法可以应用于其他营养化合物和地区。
