Lancaster County Makes the Switch to Real-Time Water Quality Monitoring Systems

Continuous data collection in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, started about 5 years ago, and the county will be making a major upgrade over the next year—switching from relying solely on the internal storage of water quality sondes to telemetry units that enable real-time data viewing.

The first telemetry unit was installed at LCCD along Little Conestoga Creek. (Credit: Tyler Keefer / LCCD)

Telling Lancaster County’s Story Through Data

Since the Lancaster County Conservation District started monitoring county waterways, the goal has remained the same, according to Amanda Goldsmith, Watershed Specialist for the Watershed Department.

“Our goal is to tell our own story as we try to restore Lancaster’s streams through restoration and other best management practices,” states Goldsmith.

Because Lancaster is predominantly an agricultural county with about 5000 farms and a lot of urban development, according to Goldsmith, there is a lot of conflicting land use in the county that makes reducing outputs difficult.

However, the department works with county, state, and federal groups to respond to non-point source pollution by working with farms, land owners, and construction companies to implement specialized best management practices and reduce influxes of contaminants.

Amanda Goldsmith at a recently planted riparian buffer on Mill Creek. (Credit: Tyler Keefer, LCCD)

At the same time, the Lancaster County Conservation District oversees and manages stream restoration projects that improve waterway health via the installation of forested riparian buffers and targeted habitat restoration projects.

Monitoring efforts help establish a baseline of conditions in the waterways before, during, and after restoration and implementation of best management practices. Current efforts will contribute to a future data pool that allows operators to see the history of the county in water health.

Presently, the data collected helps the Lancaster County Conservation District measure outputs from county waterways to the Chesapeake Bay. In the Bay Watershed in Pennsylvania, Lancaster alone is tasked with reducing 21% of nitrogen and 23 % of phosphorous loads.

Switching to telemetry units is just the next step in improving the department’s data collection and building a better data pool for future use.

Noelle Cudney and Amanda Goldsmith demonstrate stream measurements for water quality monitoring volunteers. (Credit: Linda Saad)

Switching to Telemetry in Lancaster

The small water quality monitoring team of Goldsmith, Noelle Cudney (Data Coordinator), and Tyler Keefer (Watershed Resource Specialist) manage a network of 15 YSI EXO2 sondes throughout Lancaster County. The sondes continuously measure turbidity, pH, conductivity, temperature, total dissolved solids, and dissolved oxygen at various stations in the county.

While the team has historically relied on the internal storage of the sondes to hold data, this approach led to data gaps when instrumentation failed in the field without the team knowing. Since the team is so small, sites are typically only visited every seven weeks to collect data and calibrate sondes, meaning that a failure could lead to days or weeks of lost data.

Thanks to funding from the Lancaster County Commissioners through American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars, the Lancaster County Conservation District purchased 15 NexSens X3 data loggers in 2024 to be added to their existing sonde deployments. The addition of the telemetry units will allow the team to view water quality data at any time, removing the need for site visits to download data.

Amanda Goldsmith, Noelle Cudney, and Grace Chamberlain checking for fish in the Conestoga River. (Credit: Dawn Rise Ekdahl)

The use of NexSens’ WQData LIVE platform also allows the team to set up alerts for when water quality conditions are above or below an allotted threshold or if data collection has been paused for any reason.

Only five have been installed so far, with plans to deploy five more over the winter into early spring and the remaining five before the end of 2025. The team has already benefited from the change as they were alerted of a sonde failure due to battery life on the Little Conestoga, allowing the team to respond quickly and minimize interruptions.

Future site updates will depend on agreement from landowners as several of the systems are located on private property and will build on existing and future conservation efforts in the county.

Conclusion

Though the county’s monitoring program is relatively new compared to older programs in the region, like the Susquehanna River Basin Commission and US Geological Survey, the program is important and ties back into the bigger picture of improving Lancaster streams.

Goldsmith explains, “We’re not going to see these trends right away, but knowing that my work now, decades later, will finally start to show improvements, is really important.”

She continues, “In Lancaster, we’re starting to see tiny changes. They’re not huge—they’re not dramatic. We have a huge goal to reach… but we’re seeing little changes. We’re seeing fish communities improve, and that’s from decades of work prior. It’s rewarding to know we are contributing to that bigger picture and improving our local and downstream community.”

Tyler Keefer installing an X3 telemetry unit along the upper Conestoga River. (Credit: Amanda Goldsmith / LCCD)