Valley Creek, main stem, water-quality data

Valley Creek is the finest of about a dozen remaining trout streams at the fringe of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area in east-central Minnesota. The stream is tributary to the St.. Croix River, a federally designated National Scenic Riverway, and therefore provides an important contribution to the biodiversity of the St. Croix’s watershed. Urbanization by the rapidly expanding metropolitan area may threaten the integrity of Valley Creek, and automated monitoring was begun in 1998-99 to document baseline conditions, to allow trends to be identified, and to calibrate predictive models.
This dataset consists of water-quality data for baseflow and storm samples from August 1997 to the present. Baseflow samples were collected bi-weekly to monthly; stormflow samples were collected by automated samplers triggered by stage changes. Most samples were analyzed for nutrients and suspended sediment; selected samples were analyzed for major ions as well.