Statewide Ground Water Quality Monitoring (GWQM)

What is the Environmental Data Management System (EDMS)?

The Environmental Data Management System (EDMS) is a central database designed to house Idaho ground water quality data and well characteristics from several state agencies and provide for easy access and retrieval via the internet. This data can be used for trend monitoring, parameter-specific studies, remediation studies, or to define environmental characteristics in an area.

The History of EDMS

The Ground Water Quality Protection Act of 1989 provided for development of this comprehensive system to manage ground water data. The Idaho Ground Water Protection Interagency Cooperative Agreement of 2008 establishes EDMS as the repository for ground water quality data to facilitate cooperative ground water protection programs among multiple state agencies.

EDMS also provides data to the IDWR Node on the National Environmental Information Exchange Network. This allows data to be submitted and shared by network partners through standardized data exchange templates.

EDMS presently contains more than 450,000 analytical results records from laboratory tests for contaminants and water measurement parameters. These were produced from more than 17,000 ground water samples taken at over 4000 sites throughout Idaho by many agencies, including IDWR, IDEQ, ISDA, State Health Districts, and also USGS, USBR, and USACE.