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Creeks & Rivers
Creek Monitoring
Water quality monitoring plays an important role in assessing the health of the City’s creeks, rivers and the Bay. Any program to improve water quality needs to assess the present conditions and document change over time. Since watersheds often cross jurisdictional boundaries, regional approaches to monitoring are usually the most appropriate. The Santa Clara Valley Urban Runoff Pollution Prevention Program (SCVURPPP) monitors creeks throughout the Santa Clara Valley, including those within the boundaries of the City of San José through its Multi Year Monitoring Plan.
 The SCVURPPP monitoring program measures specific pollutants such as heavy metals, pesticides, and trash. This high quality scientific data is a cornerstone for assessing creek health. But the health of the creeks is dependent on far more than just the purity of the water flowing through it. Physical properties like stream bank stability, presence of tree canopy cover, silt levels, temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen levels all play critical roles. All these factors contribute to habitat quality for wildlife living in the creeks and along the stream banks.
The SCVURPPP monitoring program also uses bioassessment techniques to provide an integrated picture of stream health. Aquatic insects and other invertebrates (Benthic Macroinvertebrates or BMI) are collected using standard protocols. The numbers and types of organisms are tabulated in the laboratory, and the results analyzed statistically to provide a robust indicator of stream health. BMI can be used as indicators of stream conditions since they integrate physical and pollutant effects throughout their lives. In contrast, most conventional measurements of physical and chemical factors provide only a snapshot of stream conditions.
These monitoring efforts are also designed to compliment larger water quality monitoring programs such as the State of California’s Surface Water Ambient Monitoring Program (SWAMP), which aims to characterize water quality in streams, lakes and reservoirs statewide.
Currently, the SCVURPPP monitoring program collects data and samples three times per year, in the spring, fall, and winter. The Program rotates through the Santa Clara Basin watersheds, visiting each in two consecutive years and following up where necessary. Data are compiled, analyzed, and delivered electronically to the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, and reported annually in the SCVURPPP Receiving Waters Monitoring Report. For a concise description of the SCVURPPP monitoring program, see the Water Quality Monitoring and Watershed Assessment Fact Sheet.
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