Research Alert: August 21, 2023

Assessing Key Indicators of Rural Versus Urban Water Quality

This study presents a summary of water quality monitoring data sources and models, identifies the gaps that persist, and proposes the salient categories and types of data that should be contained in a national water quality monitoring database to accurately describe rural water quality.

Key Findings:

• The lack of standardized data makes it challenging to protect the public from unsafe waters in a variety of settings.
• Existing data is insufficient to produce national estimates of water quality or to compare water quality in rural versus urban areas.
• The creation of a database and model(s) to monitor and estimate water quality nationally, across both urban and rural contexts, is warranted.
• Data must be routinely collected at a fine scale of representative geographic locations to produce national estimates of water quality and/or assess differences in water quality between urban and rural areas.
• Statistical corrections for oversampling of highly polluted areas may be applied provided these sites can be differentiated from representative sites.

Additional Resources of Interest:

• Assessing Geographic Variability in Key Indicators of Air Quality: A Rural vs. Urban Comparison of Pollution and Socio-Economic Factors
• More information about the Rural and Minority Health Research Center
• More information from the Rural Health Information Hub's topic guide: Agricultural Health and Safety