Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID AR_2025_Muenich

From Data to Drops: A Novel Approach to Integrating & Inferring Water Quality

Institute: Arkansas
USGS Grant Number:
Year Established: 2025 Start Date: 2026-08-01 End Date: 2029-07-31
Total Federal Funds: $283,669 Total Non-Federal Funds: $283,673

Principal Investigators: Rebecca Muenich

Project Summary: Clean water is vital for people, ecosystems, and economies, yet monitoring water quality across the U.S. is expensive and inconsistent. Many rivers and streams are only sampled a few times each year, leaving big gaps in our understanding of how pollution moves through watersheds. This project will use machine learning to ?fill in the gaps? by generating new water quality data from existing measurements. In addition to formatting and standardizing observations, our Data to Drops tool combines different types of chemical information - for example, inorganic and organic nitrogen - to calculate a new estimate of total nitrogen. Early testing showed that thousands of new observations can be created each year without collecting new samples. We will expand and test this approach with all nutrients and sediments, build a free and user-friendly R package, and share results widely. The outcome will give scientists, managers, and communities better data to protect water resources.