2021 Synoptic Water Quality Study Data

The Synoptic Water Quality Study was initiated in 1980 by federal, provincial, and academic partners to monitor lake health in the Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia. The synoptic water quality surveys—measuring major ions, nutrients, pH, organic matter, and trace elements—have been conducted on a decadal basis on a set of ~50 lakes. This dataset contains the measurements collected during the 2021 sampling campaign.

Citation

Dalhousie University Centre for Water Resources Studies. 2023-04-26. "2021 Synoptic Water Quality Study Data" (dataset). 2.0.0. DataStream. https://doi.org/10.25976/sx7h-qc61.

Funding Sources

This project was funded by a Natural Sciences and Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant, an NSERC graduate scholarship (CGS-M), a Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarship (NSGS), and a Killam Predoctoral Scholarship. Financial support was also received from the Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia Environment and Climate Change, and in-kind support was received from Environment and Climate Change Canada and Halifax Water.

Data Collection Information

Surface samples were collected via helicopter or boat from each of the study lakes on March 30, 2021. Variability in water chemistry within each lake was reduced by collecting surface samples in the early spring, immediately following ice-out, when lakes were mixing. Following collection, surface water samples were transported to a lab and divided, and the subsamples were either analyzed onsite or were delivered to commercial, government, and academic laboratories for immediate analysis. Each sample was measured for a standard set of water quality parameters. Quality control measures included replicate sampling in a subset of lakes and verifying agreement among replicates, as well as the collection of field blanks to assess procedural variability. Additionally, multiple surface samples were collected and compared for large lakes, and lakes having distinct basins.

Data Processing

Where multiple measurements were collected from a single study lake, the measurements were averaged. All questionable measurements were removed/flagged. Wherever measurements fell below the detection limit, half the detection limit was reported.

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/

API Access

curl -G https://api.datastream.org/v1/odata/v4/Records --data-urlencode "\\$filter=DOI eq '10.25976/sx7h-qc61'" -H "x-api-key: PRIVATE-API-KEY"

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