Monitoring Stations in SWIMS

SWIMS is a statewide database to store and access water quality data. Monitoring stations are located in the system against the 1:24,000 scale hydrolayer (statewide map of water features (excluding springs, wetlands, and below ground streams)), which makes the stations available in maps to view, verify, and use in presentations, reports, and analyses. You can view the state's montioring stations using the Surface Water Data Viewer (see right), where they are availe as a layer selection under "The database relationships create the connections between monitoring projects, stations, fieldwork events, collectors, and lab data.

• Project Name and Account Codes
• Collector Names and Fieldwork Events
• Waterbody Identification Codes (WBICs)
• Latitude and Longitude Location

SWIMS stations can be "points" or "areas" which enables the researcher to reflect the intent of the monitoring. Point stations can reflect a starting point for a linear survey, such as a fish shocking study or a water grab sample in a stream or lake. An area station might reflect the overall area within which transect points are established for transparency, aquatic plant infestations, or other types of studies in which fixed points are combined to represent a larger area (another example is a the use of satellite imagery to calculate Trophic State Index (TSI) values for a lake).

There are 36,857 stations in SWIMS (about 29,000 of these are point stations, the rest are 'area' stations (like a whole lake)). Of these, 15,201 have a corresponding station in the Fisheries database, which wholes the a variety of fisheries data. About 670 of the 15,000 stations were newly established in 2007. This means that a fisheries survey data entry has been initiated. These new stations represent previous years' data as well as new fish survey data.