EPA’s Vision for WQX Suzanne Schwartz, Deputy Office Director, US EPA Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds STORET/WQX Users Conference, Austin TX

Status in 2004 –140 organizations contributing data –160,000 sites monitored –21.5 million monitoring results Status Today –Over 300 organizations contributing data –Over 320,000 sites monitored –About 70 million monitoring results STORET Progress

November 2004

November 2007

Is STORET going away? WQX replaces the distributed STORET system as the means for submitting data to the STORET Warehouse With WQX, users will be able to submit data directly to the Warehouse instead of sending data to EPA Headquarters first STORET Warehouse is NOT going away STORET Warehouse will incorporate new data via WQX and all data previously submitted

WQX is a key piece of EPA’s new direction Water Quality Exchange (WQX) is a streamlined mechanism for submitting data to the STORET warehouse Any database can be “mapped” to the STORET Warehouse and its data (with appropriate documentation) uploaded to the Warehouse

EPA’s Vision for WQX An integration of water monitoring data to improve water quality decisions A standard data sharing template (schema) that multiple data partners can publish to from any database (states, consortia, USGS, others) Water quality data management and maintenance by data owners Data sharing and synthesis between multiple organizations, at multiple levels

The Water Quality Vision

Current Uses of STORET Data to Support EPA Decision Making Serve data to modeling and data analysis activities for planning and decision making Serve data to special need databases like Hurricane Katrina and the Nutrient Database Make available data collected under national survey efforts (coastal, streams, fish tissue, etc) Make available data collected under the Beaches Act Support tribes in tracking water quality progress

STORET’s Benefits STORET Warehouse is the only multi- jurisdictional, multi-organizational data warehouse providing water quality data Data is of documented quality and in a consistent format

Sites monitored by MTDEQ (blue) National Park Service Ft. Peck Tribe Additional monitoring stations (red) STORET serves data from multiple organizations in a consistent format, supports more robust analysis

Helping with the Transition Recognizing the impact, EPA is committed to helping organizations transition from distributed STORET to WQX –R8 consortium –Exchange Network –XML Generation Tool The STORET Team is available to help you