National Aquatic Resource Surveys (NARS) Data for Addressing Research Questions at Broad Spatial and Temporal Scales
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The National Aquatic Resource Surveys (NARS) program, a collaboration among United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) Office of Water, Office of Research and Development (ORD), and states and tribes, assesses progress towards the objective of the Clean Water Act through field-based assessments conducted annually on a five-year cycle in lakes, rivers, streams, coasts, and wetlands. NARS is the only national program that produces publicly available, long-term, probabilistic, field-based data for the nation’s aquatic resources. Since its inception in 2007, NARS has amassed physical, chemical, and biological data from over 16,000 sites. The probabilistic design enables the use of data collected in the field from individual sites to make estimates with confidence for regional and national populations of any given aquatic resource. However, in recent years, these data have been increasingly leveraged to address a variety of large-scale ecological questions that would not have been possible before. In this talk, we provide an overview of the NARS program and a short tutorial covering the survey design and how to leverage and utilize the publicly available data (https://www.epa.gov/national-aquatic-resource-surveys). We also highlight published examples from US EPA ORD that demonstrate the power of NARS data and analysis methods to answer research questions focused on patterns and drivers of freshwater biodiversity and physiochemical conditions across broad spatial extents and over long temporal scales. The views expressed in this abstract are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the US EPA.