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.