Poudre water quality network:
real-time monitoring for real-world issues
The Poudre Water Quality Network tracks key water quality indicators across Fort Collins, helping protect the river, inform water management decisions, support long-term research, and engage the community in watershed health.
what is the pwqn?
The Poudre Water Quality Network, or PWQN, is a collection of real-time water quality monitoring stations installed along the Cache la Poudre River in Fort Collins, CO, investigating how the river changes as it moves through the city.
Each water quality monitoring station is equipped with an In-Situ water quality meter, that measures key parameters like temperature and turbidity (how clear the water is). These sensors transmit data every six hours to a cloud-based platform, allowing near real-time water quality monitoring.
To ensure quality, all real-time data are processed and reviewed before being shared with City staff. Eventually, water quality alert thresholds will deliver timely detection of pollution events to City staff so they can pivot to protect water supply.
Through the PWQN, we hope to:
Improve understanding of current and future water quality threats.
Guide management decisions to sustain and improve water quality.
Engage the community in the importance of river and watershed health.
real-time water quality monitoring
Rivers experience many challenges that could compromise water quality—from wildfires to pollution to algae. These issues can impact river health and make it challenging to deliver drinking and irrigation water.
City of Fort Collins staff currently monitor water quality in the Poudre River by collecting field samples and analyzing them in a laboratory. While effective for characterizing water quality and identifying long-term trends, these data only provide a snapshot of water conditions and make it hard to pivot quickly to protect supply.
In 2018, the Poudre River experienced a mysterious fish kill, the cause of which could not be determined. This got us thinking…what if we continuously monitored the river, so we could see what was happening in near-real time?
So, we called up the City of Fort Collins and In-Situ Inc., a local water monitoring equipment manufacturer, to pitch a more robust, near-continuous monitoring system to better track impacts to water quality from human and environmental threats.
the future of water protection
While the PWQN is still in its early operational phase, the network already yields key water quality insights and provides high-precision data to Colorado State University researchers studying watershed science and climate resiliency.
In the future, residents and students will have public access to the data, providing an opportunity to learn about water quality and the specific challenges facing the Cache la Poudre watershed.
Time-lapse cameras placed at each monitoring station will provide visual context so residents, researchers, and students can view changes in the river alongside the data.
Eventually, the PWQN will be a game-changing method for monitoring water quality, allowing resource managers to make more informed decisions to keep the Poudre River healthy and resilient for generations to come.
