Transboundary Rivers Water Quality Monitoring Program

The Department of Environment and Climate Change (ECC) is responsible for monitoring transboundary waters to ensure that upstream provinces and territories are not causing downstream effects in the Northwest Territories (NWT). The Transboundary suspended sediment and water quality sampling sites were established to characterize the water quality in the major transboundary rivers flowing into the NWT. The transboundary rivers monitored under this program are the Slave, Hay, Liard and Peel Rivers.The comprehensive program has developed a solid baseline for the aquatic ecosystem of these rivers against which future changes can be measured.

Citation

Government of the Northwest Territories, Environment and Climate Change, Water Management and Monitoring Division (WMMD). 2023-04-21. "Transboundary Rivers Water Quality Monitoring Program" (dataset). 6.0.0. DataStream. https://doi.org/10.25976/429b-qn70.

Funding Sources

GNWT core funding

Data Collection Information

Water and suspended sediment samples have been collected for these transboundary rivers for almost 30 years. In addition to using a water quality mutimeter probe (hydrolab or YSI), river grab samples and suspended sediment and centrifugate water were collected using a centrifuge. Sediment and water are analyzed for: •chlorinated phenolics
• dioxins (polychlorinated dibenzo para dioxins, or PCDDs) and furans (polychlorinated dibenzofurans, or PCDFs)
• herbicides
• naphthenic acids (NAs)
• organochlorine pesticides
• polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs)
• polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)
• polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) – parent and alkylated
• polyfluorinated compounds (PFCs)
• total and dissolved metals
• nutrients
• major ions
• physical parameters

Data Processing

Considerable QAQC processing for organic analysis is carried out at the specialized labs peromforming these analysis. This includes comparisons to lab method blanks, spikes and % recovery standards. Data uploaded to the WMM Lodestar database is further processed for a variety of data quality objectives including requested detection limits, holding times, field and travel blank comparisons, replicate and Total vs Dissolved Metal RPD percentages.

Attribution Licence (ODC-By) v1.0

You are free to share, copy, distribute, use, modify, transform, build upon, and produce works from the data as long as you attribute any public use of the data, or works produced from the data, in the manner specified in the licence. For any use or redistribution of the data, or works produced from it, you must make clear to others the licence of the data and keep intact any notices on the original data. https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1-0/

Data Disclaimer

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API Access

curl -G https://api.datastream.org/v1/odata/v4/Records --data-urlencode "\\$filter=DOI eq '10.25976/429b-qn70'" -H "x-api-key: PRIVATE-API-KEY"

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