An instrument resembling a two-tone blue wrapping paper tube sits at the edge of Manatee Springs near Chiefland. Every 15 minutes, it samples the spring’s water, measures its nitrate levels and shoots off the data to a digital, public dashboard.
The gauge has sent about 385,000 of these electronic blips since its installation in 2014, offering kayakers, researchers and policymakers a report card of the spring’s poor health.
Soon the signal will stop.
The U.S. Geological Survey discontinued continuous nitrate monitoring at 13 Outstanding Florida Springs on July 1, though some instruments continue to transmit data as they await removal.
Water Management Districts’ monthly or quarterly nitrate sampling, once a form of redundancy, is now multiple sites’ main data source, creating a data gap water quality experts call “relatively modest” for some springs and “a tragedy” for others.
The extent of the cuts
Each of Florida’s five Water Management Districts has a joint funding agreement with the USGS to supplement the monitoring they do independently. The agreements cover everything from water level to dissolved oxygen and span rivers, lakes, springs and other waterbodies.
Four of the Districts told WUFT USGS had scaled back their agreements for the upcoming fiscal year, each by a different extent. The South Florida Water Management District didn’t immediately respond.
The cuts come as President Trump proposes to slash total USGS funding by more than a third, but a spokesperson from USGS didn’t respond to WUFT’s inquiry for how Florida’s reduction relates to federal funding.
Most of the impacts to Outstanding Florida Springs fall within the Suwannee River Water Management District. Last fiscal year, the District’s agreement with the USGS and other agencies totaled $1.5 million. Nitrate monitoring at the springs accounted for $97,000, about 7% of the total.
The USGS requested to stop continuous nitrate monitoring in April and the change went into effect July 1, according to the District’s July 8 Governing Board Meeting. The USGS still collects conductivity, dissolved oxygen, and temperature data at these sites.
The District will take over continuous monitoring at the Falmouth Springs, but doesn’t “have the capacity to add the other continuous stations at this time,” wrote District communications chief Troy Roberts.
The District also plans to take over some water quantity monitoring the USGS is stopping at non-spring sites. Staff are crunching the numbers on how much the extra work will cost, Roberts wrote, but the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, “has offered to help offset some costs associated with taking on these additional responsibilities.”
Making do with less data
Twelve of the 13 Outstanding Florida Springs where USGS stopped nitrate monitoring exceed state maximums to be classified as a “healthy spring”. The chemical comes from agricultural runoff, septic tanks and urban fertilizers, driving algal blooms that disrupt ecosystems and put off visitors.
Since contamination is so pervasive, periodic and continuous monitoring garner similar results.
Manatee Spring’s 15-minute measurements show, for example, jagged but consistently rising nitrate levels from 2014 to 2025. “If you made those measurements less frequently, that same graph of data would be dots instead of a continuous line,” said Sky Notestein, an environmental scientist with the Florida Springs Institute, “but the overall pattern would probably be similar.”
Springs in North Central Florida are fed by the Floridan Aquifer, a massive network of rocky underground waterways that produces about 1.2 trillion gallons of water each year.
At some sites, such as Silver Springs, “the actual spring vent measurements are not that variable,” said Matthew Cohen, Director of the Water Institute at the University of Florida.
Quarterly measurements will give less granularity than the former 96-per-day Cohen said, but are “almost certainly sufficient” to track springs’ progress toward long-term management goals like the nutrient reductions the FDEP updated last month.
Ryan Smart is the executive director of the Florida Springs Council, whose lawsuit prompted the FDEP update. He called continuous monitoring “low hanging fruit”, emphasizing it as an accountability tool, but not a replacement for water quality improvements.
“When it comes to nitrogen, we know where the springs are and they’re not getting better,” he said. “Our focus is really on trying to address the pollution, not track it.”
“I think that’s the nature of monitoring cuts in general,” Cohen said. “There’s always room to identify places where you can reliably lower the intensity or expense of your monitoring and other places where you really shouldn’t.”
Tracking ‘breathing’ systems
Cohen puts Ichetucknee Springs in the ‘places where you really shouldn’t’ group.
The Suwannee River Water Management District operates an independent, continuous monitor at the site’s headspring but relied on its funding agreement with the USGS to track nitrogen at the river’s south take out, where visitors haul out their inner tubes.
The District plans to continue quarterly, not continuous, monitoring at this southern site.
“To me, the real tragedy is the loss of that sensor,” Cohen said.
Between the headspring and the take out, the area’s vibrant ecosystem totally transforms the water. It changes the water’s pH and oxygen concentrations, moves minerals and shuttles nitrate into living tissues.
“I’ve called it a sort of ‘breathing river,’” Cohen said. “If we don’t have sub-daily observations, we just can’t see any of that happening.”
Real-time monitoring is also important to detect and understand spring flow reversals.
When a spring-fed river floods, the spring fights against the pressure of all of the river water and rainwater on top of it. When the pressure gets high, the spring stops flowing. If it gets even higher, the flow reverses.
“In essence, instead of it being a spring, it becomes a sinkhole,” said Notestein, the environmental scientist.
Reversals at most springs are infrequent, meaning that staff can miss them if only monitoring once per month or per quarter.
But some scholars contend that reversals are becoming longer and more frequent in riverside springs including Troy, Lafayette Blue and Suwannee, Cohen said, and continuous nitrate monitoring makes sure researchers don’t miss them.
The 13 Outstanding Florida Springs impacted by USGS cuts are: Falmouth Spring, Fanning Springs, Ichetucknee Spring Group, Jackson Blue Spring, Lafayette Blue Spring, Madison Blue Spring, Manatee Spring, Rock Springs, Silver Springs, Troy Spring, Wacissa Spring Group, Wakulla Spring and Wekiwa Spring.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
