The Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy (NDEE) is charged with monitoring, assessing, and to the extent possible, managing the state’s water resources. The purpose of this work is to protect and maintain good quality water and encourage or execute activities to improve poor water quality. Monitoring is done on the over 18,000 miles of flowing rivers and streams, our greater than 280,000 acres of surface water in lakes and reservoirs, and the vast storage of groundwater in Nebraska’s aquifers.
This document brings together a short summary of the monitoring programs performed (or required) by the NDEE. In many cases, recent results are highlighted in the descriptions. There are also several descriptions of successes in water quality programs and examples of how the data that are collected are used. Individual program summaries, in some cases, include descriptions or explanations of water quality trends or observations.
This document is not meant to be a comprehensive or exhaustive scientific report; rather, it is a starting place for describing the numerous monitoring programs carried out by the NDEE, its contractors, or, in some cases, the regulated community. Other NDEE reports and documents have more in-depth data and descriptions for many of the programs. The reader will be directed to these in the individual program descriptions, or can contact the author sited at the end of each description for further information
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