This post is part of this week’s featured projects about water quality monitoring. Take a look!
Clean water. We all need it. It is necessary for human health, food security, economic growth, and preservation of natural habitats. Sadly, human activity often threatens water quality. Tracking water quality is a crucial step is maintaining safe water. It is also a huge effort.
Across the nation, individuals volunteer their time to monitor the waters in their local streams, bays and waterways. Monitoring activities include testing water chemistry, species surveys, physical assessments of watershed characteristics and surrounding habits, among others. The data collected enable researchers, policymakers, watershed organizations and local citizens to understand how our activities affect water quality, an important step learning how to protect these valuable resources.
With so many individual groups, understanding and implementing training and testing is a challenge. Recognizing this, the Extension Volunteer Monitoring Network was established. By increasing support and communication between groups, the hope is to build a cohesive “best practices” handbook for current and future groups. The network has made a significant push to help groups to get started, and to build the capacity of existing groups. Already, their website is rich with resources on training guides, equipment suggestions, to validation studies which individual groups can use to grow and develop their efforts.
Most recently, the project launched a completely updated online directory of volunteer water monitoring programs in the United States. Their directory map provides links to over 400 programs which represent 1800 different water monitoring initiatives. All programs listed were contacted to ensure they were still active and previously unlisted programs were added as well. The website also has a list of the monitoring programs.
Here at SciStarter, we have a number of water-related programs that are certainly worth checking out. Here is a small sample:
Creek Freaks – Participants gather information on stream health, posting the information on an interactive map.
Great Lakes Environmental Monitoring – Help monitor water quality around the Great Lakes.
Wading for Water Sticks – Volunteers study water sticks insects and their water environments.
Marine Debris Tracker – A mobile app that tracks debris along your local coastline or waterway.
SeaNet – Volunteers measure the effects of offshore developments on seabirds
Secchi Dip-In – Annually in July, participants are asked to take a transparency measurement in a local waterway. (Deadline for this year was July 21.)
To browse over 600 active citizen science projects, visit SciStarter’s project finder.
Carolyn Graybeal holds a PhD in neuroscience from Brown University. She is a former National Academies of Science Christine Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Fellow during which time she worked with the Marian Koshland Science Museum. In addition the intricacies of the human brain, she is interested in the influence of education and mass media in society’s understanding of science.
Photo: www.dec.ny.gov
