In 2011, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) commissioned the administration of four citizen- focused listening sessions, three rural and one urban, to gather input for the development of Iowa’s Nonpoint Source Management Plan. The resulting report, Water Quality Matters to Us All (Comito et al., 2011), detailed the listening session outcomes and represented the diverse understandings of water quality at the time. The report also explored how these voices could change the discourse about water quality and nonpoint source pollution in Iowa.

A decade later, the DNR determined that it was important to revisit the themes of that influential report
to explore the extent to which the human and sociological dimensions of solving the state’s water quality challenges have changed.