Aquatic Life

Draft Strategy: Proposed Revisions to the “Guidelines for Deriving Numerical National Water Quality Criteria for the Protection of Aquatic Organisms and Their Uses” (PDF, 74KB) EPA will establish a Guidelines Revision workgroup to identify, evaluate, and revise the existing Guidelines. (February 6, 2003)

Current Criteria Table containing aquatic life criteria for pollutants.

Finalized criteira documents

Cadmium | Dissolved Oxygen | Tributyltin

Criteria under development

EPA is revising the current aquatic life criteria for copper, silver, lead, iron and selenium and is developing new aquatic life criteria for atrazine, diazinon, nonylphenol, methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MtBE), manganese.

Atrazine	Copper	Nonylphenol
Ammonia	Diazinon	Selenium
	Lead	Silver

Other resources

• Order Other Criteria Documents through of Office of Water Resource Center's on-line publication shopping cart
• Chemical Specific Criteria Documents from the 1980's
• Quality Criteria for Water 1986 [The Gold Book] - May 1986 (PDF, 5 mb, 477 pages, about this format)
• Quality Criteria for Water 1976 [The Red Book] - July 1976 (PDF, 13 mb, 534 pages, about this format)

Water Quality Standards | Drinking Water | Research and Development

EPA Home | Privacy and Security Notice | Contact Us