**Author details**

*Water Quality - Science, Assessments and Policy*

stressors of concern as they emerge.

products, services, or enterprises.

**Conflict of interest**

is not subject to U.S. copyright protection.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

**Acknowledgements**

Until the early 2000s, the history of monitoring lakes in the United States had been a succession of reactive efforts to assess particular stressors to determine how widespread they were and what policies, if any, should be adopted to tackle them. This strategy was moderately effective with domestic point source discharges like sewage treatment plants and with the deposition of acidic compounds as a result of sulfur and nitrogen compounds into the atmosphere. But many stressor-response problems are more complex, both in regional distribution and in likely causes. The NLA was initiated in 2007 to provide a more holistic and comprehensive approach to monitoring the quality of our lakes and the stressors impacting them while still allowing a platform to track specific lake

The authors gratefully acknowledge the tremendous effort and collaboration on the part of the USEPA Office of Water, the USEPA Office of Research and Development, and numerous state, federal, tribal, and contractor organizations that provide field, laboratory, and data analysis support for the National Lakes Assessment. The authors appreciate the constructive reviews of earlier drafts by D. Adams, F. John, and J. Markwiese. This chapter has been subjected to Agency review and has been approved for publication. The views expressed in this chapter are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Any mention of trade names, products, or services does not imply an endorsement by the U.S. Government or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA does not endorse any commercial

This work was authored by United States Government employees as part of their official duties. In view of Section 105 of the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. §105) the work

**9. Conclusions**

**106**

David V. Peck1 \*, Steven G. Paulsen1 , Philip R. Kaufmann1,2 and Alan T. Herlihy2,3

1 Office of Research and Development, US Environmental Protection Agency, Corvallis, OR, USA

2 Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

3 National Research Council Senior Fellow, Corvallis, OR, USA

\*Address all correspondence to: peck.david@epa.gov

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
