Check out the new dynamic, user-friendly dashboard for the Annual Water Quality Monitoring Plan launched by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ)! This new platform represents a significant advance in how DEQ communicates and manages its monitoring efforts.
The tool allows users to explore monitoring data across the Commonwealth, with filtering options by program, region, river basin, and other parameters. Beyond improving public transparency, this interface strengthens internal quality assurance by enabling staff to more efficiently identify and resolve data integrity issues, track progress toward completing planned monitoring activities on schedule, and ensure alignment with overall budget expectations. These improvements directly support DEQ’s strategic goal of advancing data-driven planning and decision making.
DEQ is accepting nominations for Virginia waterbodies for monitoring in the 2027 monitoring plan. Nominations will be accepted through April 30 via the DEQ Volunteer Monitoring webpage.
In related news, DEQ’s nutrient trading marketplace Stream, Wetland, and Nutrient Credit Exchange (SWaN) was featured in a February 6 Wall Street Journal article on a former golf course that has been returned to a natural state as a nutrient land bank. Through this program, companies can fund mitigation initiatives to offset environmental damage from their operations. SWaN provides a public marketplace for mitigation credits where buyers and sellers have full price transparency and regulatory provenance. In the article, upcoming ECOS Spring Meeting speaker Tim Male of the Environmental Policy Innovation Center praises the program’s effectiveness, noting that “the small ways that nature gets damaged is sort of death by 1000 cuts,” but Virginia “is the only place in the world where I know that these small harms are captured.” For more information on SWaN, see this ECOS article and DEQ’s 2025 ECOS State Innovation Award video.
