Southern Florida National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program

NAWQA is designed to assess historical, current, and future water-quality conditions in representative river basins and aquifers nationwide. One of the primary objectives of the program is to describe relations between natural factors, human activities, and water-quality conditions and to define those factors that most affect water quality in different parts of the Nation. The linkage of water quality to environmental processes is of fundamental importance to water-resource managers, planners, and policy makers. It provides a strong and unbiased basis for better decisionmaking by those responsible for making decisions that affect our water resources, including the United States Congress, Federal, State, and local agencies, environmental groups, and industry. Information from the NAWQA Program also will be useful for guiding research, monitoring, and regulatory activities in cost effective ways.
Since 1991, USGS scientists with the NAWQA program have been collecting and analyzing data and information in more than 50 major river basins and aquifers across the Nation. Together, these areas account for 60 to 70 percent of the Nation's water use and population served by public water supplies and cover about one-half of the land area of the Nation. Investigations of these areas, referred to as study units, are the principal building blocks of the NAWQA Program.
Four surveys of shallow ground water were carried out in the Southern Florida NAWQA study area from October 1996 through January 1999: a citrus agriculture land-use survey of the surficial aquifer system in Collier and Hendry Counties; a Biscayne aquifer study-unit survey of public-supply wells; a recent residential and light commercial urban land-use survey in Broward County; and a ground-water and surface-water survey of a mixed-agriculture land-use area in southern Dade County.