Recent reports on the detection of pharmaceuticals in water bodies and waste streams in Europe and the United States have raised some environmental concerns.

The purpose of this report is to document the activities completed under Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Grant Nos. NMH00000183 and NMI00000261.

The basis for understanding the abundance and distribution of arsenic in groundwater is reliable chemical analysis. Improvements in sample collection, sample pre-treatment, and on-site and off-site laboratory determination methods are sought to insure that information about arsenic is of high quality.

The principal objective of this report is to determine what is well known and what is less well known about the regional groundwater system in southeast Wisconsin in preparation for a comprehensive model aimed at addressing important water-supply issues.

Because traditional culture-based methods of bacterial detection are of limited usefulness for environmental applications, molecular methods for the detection and quantification of bacteria are essential.

Nitrates in surface waters of the Little Plover River, a cold, groundwater fed stream located in central Wisconsin, have increased from about 2 mg/L | NO3-N in the 1960s to over 8 mg/L NO3-N by 1997.