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Starkweather Creek Chloride Monitoring Update

Starkweather Creek Chloride Monitoring Update

On Wednesday, September 11, CARPC staff, Operation Fresh Start’s Conservation Academy, the State Cartographer’s Office, and the Friends of Starkweather Creek, set off on an all-day adventure installing continuous conductivity meters throughout the East Branch of Starkweather Creek. These meters will conduct a conductivity test every 10 minutes; results will be sent to the cloud, enabling our team and the public to monitor the results in real time. Through measuring conductivity, we hope to identify primary point sources of chloride entering into the watershed.

The blue line represents east-branch conductivity, whereas the green line represents west-branch conductivity. We anticipate that the difference in conductivity between the two branches will differ more significantly in the winter when salting and melting events occur.

Luckily for our team, the weather was perfect, as many of us ended the day with fully water-logged waders. As we have learned from the prior winter, the time to install these meters is now, not in the middle of the winter.

The installation site is at the confluence of the east and west branches of the Starkweather at Sherry Park. One sensor probe was placed in each branch. The east branch has historically higher chloride loads compared to the west branch.

In 2016, portions of both branches of Starkweather Creek were listed as impaired by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for chloride chronic aquatic toxicity. While chloride is recognized as a surface water pollutant, it is mostly an unregulated substance. Since chloride is not removed through wastewater treatment or retained through biological cycles, reducing overall salt use is the easiest way to decrease chloride reaching water resources. These reductions rely on voluntary water softener optimization and the implementation of de-icing best practices.

After several years of conducting an average of 200 manual chloride tests using test strips and a team of dedicated volunteers, we adapted to a more automated approach—with continuous testing—to collect data to further our understanding of chloride sources entering the watershed.

Stay tuned for more information. Soon, we will be helping Operation Fresh Start create their own GIS/field data collection applications that we will be testing in the field to do continuous monitoring at each meter location. Our end goal is to better understand the relationships between weather patterns, salting practices, and chloride levels in the creek.