Every two years, Pennsylvania is required to tell the EPA and the public how its waters are doing. That document is the Integrated Report, and the state just finalized its 2026 edition. To help our partners make sense of it, the H2O Water Network sat down with Dustin Shull of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, who leads the assessment section in the Bureau of Clean Water. He walked us through what the report is, how to use it, and how the data our partners collect ends up shaping it.
If your work touches a stream, a lake, or a watershed anywhere in our region, this report is about as close as it gets to a public scorecard for the water you care about. The full recording is below, and here is what stood out.
What the report is, in plain terms
The Integrated Report is a Clean Water Act obligation that every state files every two years. The name comes from the two parts of the law it pulls together. Section 303D is the list of impaired waters that need a cleanup plan, known as a Total Maximum Daily Load, or TMDL. Section 305B is the bigger-picture narrative on the health of the state’s streams, rivers, lakes, and groundwater.
Pennsylvania finalized the 2026 report just after April 1 and submitted it to the EPA. The state is now waiting to hear whether the EPA approves it, rejects it, or approves part of it.
Three ways to actually use it
Back in 2018, this report was a single PDF close to 5,000 pages long. The state has since broken it into three digital pieces that work on a phone, tablet, or computer:
- The story map is the narrative. It reads like an accordion, so you can skim the high points or click into any chapter and dig as deep as you want.
- The mapping application is the data. You can zoom into your own backyard, click a stream, and see its current status along with the sources and causes of any impairment.
- The demonstration videos are short training walkthroughs for both tools.
A quick tip from the mapper walkthrough: blue means a water is supporting its use, orange means impaired. Because several uses are stacked on a single layer, a blue line on top can hide an orange one underneath. If what you see on the map matters to your work, filter down to the one use you care about, or click the segment and read every record. You can also query by stream name, assessment ID, or source and cause, though the system caps large searches at roughly 2,000 records. Narrow your query to a single watershed or county and it behaves much better.
The part that matters most: your data counts
This was the heart of the conversation for our partners. The state does not assess every water on its own. It accepts data from other agencies, conservation districts, watershed groups, and citizen scientists through its existing and readily available data process.
Submitted data moves through a tiered system. Tier 3 is assessment-grade data the state can use directly to make a call on a stream, and getting there means going through an audit. Data that comes in below Tier 3 is not thrown out. The state still evaluates it, uses it to flag waters where conditions may have changed, and bumps those waters up the priority list for a future visit.
That priority list matters more than it might sound. Pennsylvania can only reassess about 10 to 12 percent of the state every two years. The unofficial goal is to revisit each water every 10 to 15 years. The real-world average right now is closer to 35 years, which is actually a big improvement on the roughly 60-year pace of a few years ago. When a partner shows up with recent, protocol-following data on a stream the state last looked at in 2008, that is exactly the kind of signal that moves a watershed up the queue.
One of our partners raised this directly, noting that many groups in the region are running macroinvertebrate surveys under the ICE protocol and getting results that differ sharply from state data that is sometimes more than a decade old. The answer was clear: yes, the state wants that data. Groups following the methods in the state’s monitoring and assessment books should submit what they have, even if they have not been audited yet. If the numbers show a difference from the current assessment, those waters get prioritized. Groups that go through the audit can have their data used to make assessments directly.
And the appetite is real. Data submissions to the state tripled between the 2024 and 2026 cycles.
What the numbers say about the streams
- Pennsylvania tracks roughly 85,000 stream miles, which works out to around 420,000 individual records once you account for multiple uses and stream segments.
- Siltation is the single biggest cause of stream impairment in the state, which is why so many of the cleanup plans being written now target it.
- In lakes, mercury is a leading cause of fish-consumption impairment, a different pattern than streams.
- Special protection waters, which the state holds to a higher standard, are doing well, with more than 80 percent supporting their uses. Other cold and warm water fisheries sit around 70 percent supporting.
- Recreation is the big gap. Only about 40 percent of those waters have been assessed, because it requires bacteria sampling for E. coli. Closing that gap is a current focus.
New in the 2026 edition
The state added several tools this cycle:
- A trends tool that runs the statistics on whether monitoring sites are getting better, worse, or holding steady for a given parameter, like chloride or nitrogen.
- A restored waters map showing every segment that was once impaired and is now supporting its use. Plenty of small success stories on it.
- A grant status map tracking funding and implementation.
- Story maps that explain how the data is collected in the first place, including one on how macroinvertebrate samples drive assessment decisions.
- Special protection broken out as its own category for the first time, separate from general aquatic life.
The honest answers
A couple of questions got candid responses worth repeating.
Is Pennsylvania’s water getting better? The Integrated Report by itself cannot answer that. But a separate statistical study the state recently published, comparing macroinvertebrate data from 2006 to 2015 against 2016 to 2025, found a modest improvement, with about a 5 percent shift of sites from poor up to fair. The extremes held steady, but the middle moved in the right direction.
What about the small, seasonal streams? Pennsylvania goes by its own state regulations, which are stricter than the current federal definition of protected waters. If it shows up as a blue line, intermittent or ephemeral, it is still a surface water of the commonwealth with uses that must be protected.
How does the state handle pollution that crosses borders? This one lands close to home for our network. The state holds quarterly meetings with its EPA Region 3 counterparts, which include Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, and Delaware, and coordinates directly with New York and Ohio as needed. East Palestine came up as a live example, since some of those waters flow into Pennsylvania, along with shared waters like Dunkard Creek, the Monongahela, and the Cheat. For a basin that does not stop at a state line, that coordination is the whole ballgame.
How to get involved
If your group collects water data, the state genuinely wants it. A few practical steps from the conversation:
- The main contact for data submissions is Sean Miller in the DEP assessment section.
- Use the submission templates on the state’s existing and readily available data page. Digital beats a PDF printout every time, though they will take whatever you have.
- Interested in reaching Tier 3? Reach out by July 30 to get into the audit schedule for the following fall or spring.
- Follow the methods in the state’s monitoring and assessment books. The ICE protocol lives in the monitoring book now.
The takeaway is simple enough. The report is more open, more interactive, and more partner-friendly than it has ever been, and the people building it are asking for our help. The water in our region is worth the trouble of clicking around.
