Water Resources Research Center

The Acid Rain Monitoring Project began at the University of Massachusetts Water Resources Research Center in 1983. The project's mission was initially to develop a comprehensive picture of the sensitivity of Massachusetts surface waters to acid deposition, and later evolved to determine long-term trends in this sensitivity.

Project website.

The UMass Amherst Blackstone River Water Quality Study was initiated in 2004 to develop a watershed management tool for the Blackstone River basin. This effort was funded by the Upper Blackstone Water Pollution Abatement District (UBWPAD) and was conducted with the support of the Cambridge, Mass. office of Camp Dresser and McKee (CDM), now CDM-Smith. The study was initiated to enhance the overall understanding of flow and water quality characteristics of the river.

This project will link fluvial geomorphology to New England-specific climate, landscape, ecology, population, and infrastructure to develop best management practices for flood prevention. Also, it will uncover challenges and constraints caused by distinct jurisdictional and institutional fragmentation, highlighting successful strategies for overcoming these. The extension aspect will take this much-needed scientific and institutional knowledge and disseminate it among towns, government officials, landowners, businesses, environmental organizations, road crews, and others.

This project utilizes robotic submersible technology to characterize submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) blooms in the Charles River (MA) at the organismal, molecular and atomic levels. Data from this research will be useful in devising methodologies to control SAV contamination in the waterways of Massachusetts and other regions of the Northeast.

High levels of tungsten were recently detected in Massachusetts Military Reservation groundwater. This prompted the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Defense to declare the metal as an emerging contaminant. This project aims to design and synthesize the renewable biopolymer chitosan into novel nano-constructs that will efficiently remove tungsten from dilute aqueous solutions. Undergraduate students will systematically identify the sorption properties and mechanisms for an assortment of chemically and physically modified chitosans.

Despite the significant efforts to reduce nitrogen discharge from wastewater treatment facilities (WWTFs), the Long Island Sound (LIS) area affected by hypoxia actually increased over the last decade. Our preliminary research has suggested that WWTFs utilizing the biological nitrogen removal (BNR) process may actually increase particular forms of N that are more potent for algal bloom in LIS. We propose a research plan to evaluate the true impact of upgrading WWTF for N removal (i.e., BNR) on receiving water eutrophication and toxic algal bloom.

Stormwater BMPs have emerged as essential tools in the mitigating impacts on hydrologic functions resulting from urbanization and its associated impervious surfaces. Yet the effectiveness of the BMPs has been understudied in relationship to effective impervious area and land development patterns linking neighborhood and watershed scales. In addition, there is a need to understand the effectiveness of BMPs under various precipitation patterns, particularly extreme storm events based on the IPCC climate change scenarios.

This project will study and numerically model road salt impact on water quality in a typical aquifer in eastern Massachusetts. The study area is a public water well field in the Town of Norwell presently instrumented with 3 multiparameter sensors at different aquifer depths and one sensor located in the nearby stream. The well field is within a glacial outwash area with simple subsurface geology and lies a short distance from major road salt sources including MA Rt. 3, a mall, and lies downstream from a road salt storage shed.