Truckee River Info Gateway - TRIG - Project Overview

Welcome to the Truckee River Info Gateway (TRIG), which is the home for the Truckee River Water Quality Program. The objectives of this Program, encompassing the Truckee River and its sub-watersheds from Tahoe City all the way down to Pyramid Lake, are:

1. to make technical resources freely available for sharing with other collaborators, transparent to the public, and streamlining program development, with a user beware clause: each data contributor is responsible for their own QA/QC measures.
2. to use the available water quality data to determine the potential for water quality improvements through restoration and stream bank stabilization.
3. to determine the necessity of additional data collection (i.e.monitoring) to prove benefits from restoration.
4. to determine the role of anthropogenic and naturally occurring nitrogen, phosphorus and total dissolved solids (TDS) on the water quality and aquatic habitat of the Truckee River.

Background

The water quality and aquatic habitat of the Truckee River have been under investigation by the Cities of Reno and Sparks and Washoe County for many years. Throughout this time the Truckee Meadows Water Reclamation Facility (TMWRF), Nevada Division of Environmental Protection (NDEP), Desert Research Institute (DRI), and many other agencies have collected significant quantities of data on water quality. Additionally, many individual studies and regulatory monitoring efforts (e.g. National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) and other Clean Water Act requirements) have amassed large amounts of potentially useful data over limited spatial and/or temporal scales. At the present time these data do not appear to have been analyzed adequately on a large, comprehensive scale for trends, for potential water quality problems and for potential improvements. The goal of the Program is to address this gap.

Initial Efforts

We will search for and collect existing data, analyze the collected data to determine the long-term health of the Truckee River specifically associated with the urban storm water discharges, wastewater discharges and planned river restoration, identify data gaps and recommend additional data collection. The Program database will be scalable, which means that as the Program evolves and more data and information are collected, the database will grow and evolve as well.