Spatial and temporal distribution of E. coli contamination on three inland lake and recreational beach systems in the upper Midwestern United States

Swimming advisories are commonly posted at public beaches across the United States every year. In Iowa, weekly monitoring of public swimming areas at state and county beaches have resulted in the impairment of numerous lakes for fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) contamination, as detected by E. coli. An extensive study was established to assess the relationships between E. coli contamination of nearshore beach water environments, open lake conditions and beach sands in three recreational beach/lake systems currently impaired for FIB contamination across Iowa. A transect/grab sample based sampling design was implemented across the systems with collections spanning from April through October of 2015 and 2016. Collections of E. coli along water transects identified strong near to far shore gradients of decreasing concentrations in all systems. Results indicate that concentrations of E. coli observed in swimming waters consistently disassociate with concentrations in the broader lake environment. Swimming water E. coli concentrations correlated with elevated beach sand E. coli, samples collected from beach sands uncovered concentrations up to 86,500 times higher than adjacent swimming waters. Results from this study indicate that foreshore beach sands and other beach proximate FIB sources serve as the major contributing source for swimming zone advisories. The current methodology used by state and federal officials includes impairing entire lake waterbodies for FIB contamination of the swimming area. These impairment listings do not accurately reflect the condition(s) of the larger lake environment outside the swimming area and fail to account for beach proximate conditions in the assessment process. Further, this approach provides potentially misleading information to the public and may undermine implementation strategies deployed by resource managers aimed at addressing FIB contamination at recreational swimming areas. Views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.