Cation Data for the East River Watershed, Colorado

This data package contains mean values for cation concentration for water samples taken from the East River Watershed in Colorado. Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) has been used to measure the concentrations of 37 elements of interest simultaneously for the East River Watershed, Colorado groundwater and surface water samples to inform insights on the biogeochemistry processes within the watershed. The East River is part of the Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area (WFSFA) located in the Upper Colorado River Basin, United States. Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) has been used to measure the concentrations of 37 elements of interest simultaneously for Rifle and East River Watershed, Colorado groundwater and surface water samples. The instrumentation, Elan DRC II, PerkinElmer SCIEX, automatically switches among the three models necessary to analyze all 37 elements. These 37 elements include: (1) Lithium (Li), Beryllium (Be), Boron (B), Soldium (Na), Magnesium (Mg), Aluminium (Al), Silicon (Si), Phosphorus (P), Titanium (Ti), Cobalt (Co), Nickel (Ni), Copper (Cu), Zinc (Zn), Germanium (Ge), Arsenic (As), Rubidium (Rb), Strontium (Sr), Zirconium (Zr), Molybdenum (Mo), Silver (Ag), Cadmium (Cd), Tin (Sn), Antimony (Sb), Caesium (Cs), Barium (Ba), Europium (Eu), Lead (Pb), Thorium (Th), Uranium (U) using santadard model, argon Ar as reaction gas, (2) Potassium (K), Calcium (Ca), Vanadium (V), Chromium (Cr), Manganese (Mn), Iron (Fe) using dynamic reaction cell (DRC) model, ammonia NH3 as reaction gas, and (3) Phosphorus (P) and Selenium (Se) using DRC model, oxygen O2 as reaction gas. Note for the samples with higher concentrations of chloride (Cl-), asenic (As) concentrations were analysed with DRC model (oxygen O2 as reaction gas) to avoid the interference of chloride. All samples were prepared/diluted with 2% (v/v) ultrapure nitric acid in Milli-Q water (18.2 mega ohm-cm), and analyzsed under a rigorous quality assurace and qulity control (QA/QC) process. Each file is named by location and element. The latitude and longitude of each location are given in a file called locations.csv. Update 4/11/2021: Added Detemination of Method Detection Limits (MDLs) for ICP-MS document, which can be accessed with Microsoft Word.