Introduction


The South Fork Iowa River basin in central Iowa and the Bogue Phalia basin in northwestern Mississippi are two of seven basins selected for study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program’s Agricultural Chemicals Team (ACT) (Capel and others, 2008). The goal of the ACT studies was to identify and understand the natural and human factors that affect the transport and fate of agricultural chemicals in different environmental settings across the Nation. 


This report provides information on the environmental settings of the South Fork Iowa River and Bogue Phalia basins.


Related Publications


Prior to the ACT studies, the NAWQA program conducted water-quality studies in eastern Iowa river basins, including the South Fork Iowa River basin. Results from this earlier work are available in Becher and others (2001), Porter and others (2001), Kalkhoff and others (2001, 2003), and Schnoebelen and others (2003).


Previous NAWQA work in the Mississippi Embayment, including the Bogue Phalia basin, has addressed pesticides (Coupe and others, 1998, 2005; Coupe, 2000) and nutrients (Coupe, 2002; Runner and others, 2002) in surface water, as well as pesticides in the atmosphere (Coupe and others, 2000; Foreman and others, 2000). Water-quality investigations in the Mississippi Embayment are summarized by Kleiss and others (2000). Currently available results from the ACT study in the Bogue Phalia basin include an estimate of streambed fluxes during extreme hydrologic events (Barlow and Coupe, 2009), a characterization of the transport and fate of the herbicide fluometuron in surface water (Coupe, 2007), and a study of the factors that control the transport of nitrate to shallow groundwater (Welch and others, 2011).


Results from data collection at all seven ACT study areas, including the South Fork Iowa River and Bogue Phalia basins, are available in McCarthy and others (2011). A full bibliography of publications resulting from NAWQA work, including the seven ACT studies, is available in U.S. Geological Survey (2011). 


First posted February 16, 2012