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The USGS, in cooperation with the Maine Geological Survey (MGS) and the Maine Bureau of Parks and Land recently began a program to assess water quality in and around state parks. The program will help the Bureau of Parks and Lands ensure clean water supplies in its parks, and help educate the general public on the importance of clean ground water. This program also represents the nucleus of a cooperative USGS -- Maine Geological Survey statewide ambient ground-water-quality monitoring network. The USGS will contribute to this effort by modifying and enhancing the existing ambient ground-water level network program and twice-yearly monitoring for water-quality constituents of interest to the State. All wells will be instrumented such that the public can access the water-level data in near-real time over the Internet.
The Maine Geological Survey’s program will provide an in-depth look at the watershed and water resources of selected state parks. An evaluation of the current water resources, including sources of water and susceptibility to sources of contamination, local and regional geology and hydrogeology, and water-quality sampling of a number of existing wells in and around the public land area will be conducted for each park selected for the program. Over a period of several years, the geographic coverage of the program will increase, such that eventually most of the state’s parks will have been evaluated in this way, providing crucial information to park managers.
The program will provide much-needed information on the quality of water in aquifers in and near state lands across the state. The network of permanent, long-term ground-water-quality sites distributed in State Parks will provide a benchmark of water quality in the bedrock aquifers of the state, and will be able to track long-term changes in water quality at these public land sites. The network also will provide water level data in one of the most-utilized ground-water resources in the state (bedrock aquifers), which is under-represented in the current statewide network. By providing long-term water-quality data at these sites, the USGS will greatly improve the ability to answer common questions about the long-term status of water quality in the bedrock aquifers in the state.
Real-time ground-water monitoring well in northern Maine