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Chemical Safety and Procedures

Question

Date: Fri, 13 May 2005 10:09:24 -0400
From: Danielle Donkersloot
Subject: [CSREESVolMon] safety procedures & volunteers

I am looking for input as to how some of the other monitoring groups deal with and safety procedures for the volunteers using chemical kits.

“As part of our chemical monitoring program, we have drafted a memo on chemical safety procedures for the chemical volunteers. The memo lists all of the chemicals that the CATs use while sampling, and tells them how hazardous it is and what to do if they spill the chemical, accidentally eat it, etc. However, some of the antidotes for the spills are not common substances. For example, if a volunteer spills alkaline potassium iodide azide, they need to neutralize it with dilute hydrochloric acid. Hydrochloric acid is not a common household substance. We’re wondering if we need to even send this memo to the volunteers, and if so, do we need to supply them with hydrochloric acid in case they spill something? We have a large spill kit in our office. Do we need to supply our volunteers with spill kits? If you have any experience with chemical programs and could provide us with how you handle this?”

Any input or advise you could provide us on this matter would be great!
Thanks

“In order to achieve something, you must get started” Fortune Cookie
wisdom
Danielle Donkersloot
609-633-9241 (direct line)
609-633-1458 (fax)
PO Box 418
Trenton, NJ 08625
http://www.nj.gov/dep/wms/bwqsa/vm/

Responses

Date: Fri, 13 May 2005 11:35:41 -0400
From: Linda Green
Subject: RE: [CSREESVolMon] chemical safety procedures & volunteers

Hi folks,

In terms of chemical safety the first course of action is to thoroughly rinse the affected area with water, even using the water you just collected. We had 1 volunteer (a chemist mind you) spill alkaline potassium hydride on himself and not wanting to contaminate the stream, drive home before washing it off. So now we explicitly remind our volunteers to plunge their hands into the water. We also tell them that even if they took all the reagents in the DO kit and poured it into the water it would not harm the water. Forget the HCl, you are just substituting one potentially hazardous material with another. Often info on how to deal with a spill assumes you are in a lab. If you are using LaMotte kits, contact LaMotte at 800-344-3100. Linda Watts is the person I deal with, she is quite knowledgeable. If you are using another brand contact the manufacturer and tell them that what you are looking for is advice for volunteers, not if the chemical is spilled in a lab. We do supply the notoriously hard to decipher MSDS’ with the kits, and also give the kits out with a strong rubber band around it to help make sure it doesn’t get knocked over. You can also purchase absorbent pads from a variety of scientific supply houses. Our Safety and Risk department has given all labs a bucket of sand to pour on spills. Garden soil works well too. We give all our volunteers goggles and at least 1 pair of nitrile gloves. We don’t expect the gloves to last all season but to serve as a reminder to use gloves, which they can buy in hardware stores or supermarkets. We tell our volunteers to keep a roll of paper towels handy. We also give our volunteers paper plates (Chinet brand) and urge them to do all their titrations on the plate. The plates are fairly thick, the top is more absorbent than the really shiny ones and the lip of the plate contains most spills. The 6 3/4″ plates will contain 100 ml and the 8 3/4″ ones, 300 ml of liquid (I just checked). We are now also using these paper plates in the lab, especially for salinity titrations which involve the use of silver nitrate, which stains everything brown. The best approach to safety is training carefully and thoroughly and using common sense.

Good luck!
Linda Green

URI Cooperative Extension Water Quality
Department of Natural Resources Science
1 Greenhouse Road
Kingston, RI 02881-0804
401-874-2905
www.uri.edu/ce/wq/
www.usawaterquality.org/volunteer

Categories
Listserv

Data Quality

Question 1: I wonder which states have credible data laws that pertain to citizen monitoring.

Question 2: Have you found some good explanations about writing a QAPP?

Question 3: I would love to hear from anyone who is assessing volunteer groups for this task in a QAPP.

Question 4: Does anybody have QAPP examples that include geomorphology examples?

Question 5: If you have a QAPP that includes DQO’s for benthic macroinvertebrate monitoring by volunteers, I would love to hear about the DQO’s or see them.

Question 1

From: Kris Stepenuck
Subject: [volmonitor] states with credible data laws?
To: Volunteer water monitoring

Hi

I wonder which states have credible data laws that pertain to citizen monitoring. I know that Iowa and Ohio do, and have heard other states do as well, but am not sure which ones.

Thanks everyone!

Kris

Kris Stepenuck
WI Volunteer Stream Monitoring Coordinator and staff on Volunteer Water Monitoring National Facilitation Project
UW-Extension and WI Department of Natural Resources
210 Hiram Smith Hall
1545 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1289
Phone: 608-265-3887
Fax: 608-262-2031
http://clean-water.uwex.edu/wav
http://www.usawaterquality.org/volunteer

Responses to Question 1

From: mario castaneda
Subject: re:[volmonitor] states with credible data laws?
To: Volunteer water monitoring

Kris: The State of Arizona has the following rules regarding Credible and Defensible data:

http://www.azdeq.gov/environ/water/assessment/download/cred.pdf

ADEQ, the State agency, requires that groups receiving state grants for WQ Improvements projects follow these rules. In addition, there is an effort by ADEQ to have the voluntary groups develop a QAPP/SAP if the data will be submitted to ADEQ for consideration. As a former Volunteer Program Coordinator for the agency, we tried to work with the volunteer groups in providing training and support for these topics.

Sincerely,

Mario Castaneda, SO1312
Faculty
GateWay Community College
Water Resources Technology Program
108 N. 40th Street
Phoenix, AZ 85034
602-286-8663
602-286-8614 – fax
castaneda@gatewaycc.edu

Our state (OK) considered a bill a few years back, affectionately known as the “edible data bill.” It did not pass.

 

From: Streamkeepers
Subject: RE: [CSREESVolMon] states with credible data laws?
To: Kris Stepenuck

Washington State passed one a couple of years ago:
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/wq/qa/wqp01-11-ch2_final090506.pdf

Ed Chadd & Hannah Merrill, co-managers
Streamkeepers of Clallam County
Clallam County Department of Community Development
223 E. 4 St., Suite 5
Port Angeles, WA 98362
360-417-2281; FAX 360-417-2443
streamkeepers@co.clallam.wa.us
www.clallam.net/streamkeepers

 

From: “Broz, Robert R.”
Subject: RE: [CSREESVolMon] states with credible data laws?
To: Kris Stepenuck

Kris,

Missouri does allow credible data from certain groups and only as a way to set base data or to show a change in levels over time. It may not stand up in court but it is used to set some base line data for what is in place. We have over 3000 stream teams (only about half active) and then the Lakes of Missouri Volunteer program that also provides some excellent data.

Bob

—–Original Message—–
From: Kris Stepenuck [mailto:kris.stepenuck@ces.uwex.edu]
Sent: Monday, October 02, 2006 11:42 AM
To: Broz, Robert R.
Subject: RE: [CSREESVolMon] states with credible data laws?

Hi Bob-

Thanks. Do you know if there are laws in place that define what makes
data credible or do the agencies decide that on a case by case basis?

Thanks!

Kris

 

Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 12:53:30 -0500
From: “Broz, Robert R.”
Subject: RE: [CSREESVolMon] states with credible data laws?

Kris,

I will check on that but I don’t think there are any “laws” but anunderstanding that this data is to be used as a resource to show achange or base line in water quality.

The accuracy of the data depends on many things so those using the datatry to have several years of data and know what procedure was followedto make it “credible”. Again, most of the data can be used to “show”something but not to prove something. Such as – this is what nitrogen levels have been over the last five years and now we have an increase. As opposed to nitrogen levels are increasing due to a change in “land use and livestock operations”.

I will check but I am pretty sure there are no laws for credible data here in Missouri.

Bob

 

Other relevant information about this topic:

Question 2

Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 14:57:33 -0400
From: Joan Martin
Subject: [volmonitor] Helping program leaders write a QAPP – Need advice and
good explanations

I am starting to help program leaders write their Quality Assurance Program Plans and would like your suggestions.

Have you found some good explanations about writing a QAPP?

Thank you so much,

-Joan Martin
Huron River Watershed Council
(734) 769-5971

Responses to Question 2

Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 15:16:16 -0400
From: Chris Sullivan
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Helping program leaders write a QAPP – Need advice
and good explanations

There is an EPA guide that I have that may be a little outdated (Sept 1996) , but I think most of the subject matter is still relevant.

The Volunteer Monitor’s Guide to Quality Assurance Project Plans. The document # is EPA 841-B-96-003

Could be a good place to start. There is probably an updated version on the web. I just had a hard copy here at my desk.

Good luck with your quest!

peace
Chris

Chris Sullivan
Project SEARCH Coordinator
(203) 734-2513
FAX 203-922-7833
Center for Environmental Research Education
Kellogg Environmental Center
500 Hawthorne Ave
Derby, CT 06418

 

Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 15:31:50 -0400
From: Mayio.Alice@epamail.epa.gov
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Helping program leaders write a QAPP – Need advice
and good explanations

Joan,

Chris is right — “The Volunteer Monitor’s Guide to Quality Assurance Project Plans” is a bit long in the tooth and hasn’t been updated, much as we’d like to do so. Its available on the web at:
http://www.epa.gov/owow/monitoring/volunteer/qappcovr.htm, and mostly still is applicable.

You should check out Cooperative Extension’s volunteer monitoring webpage, specificially their fact sheet on Building Credibility, at http://www.usawaterquality.org/volunteer/Outreach/BuildingCredibilityVI.pdf
It has a very succint and readable discussion of quality assurance.

If you want to learn more about what official EPA has to say about quality assurance, we have a fairly exhaustive main EPA QA website at: http://www.epa.gov/quality/ Many of the documents at this site are very much in techno-speak, but they’re the formal agency bottom line. Hope this helps.

Alice Mayio
USEPA (4503T)
1200 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20460
(202) 566-1184

 

Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 12:44:31 -0700
From: Eleanor Ely
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Helping program leaders write a QAPP – Need advice
and good explanations

The Adopt-A-Stream Foundation’s “Streamkeeper’s Field Guide” has a nice section on writing a QAPP. The manual can be ordered from www.streamkeeper.org/catalog.

Ellie

Eleanor Ely
Editor, The Volunteer Monitor Newsletter
50 Benton Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94112

 

Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 13:05:04 -0700
From: HANSON Steve
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Helping program leaders write a QAPP – Need advice
and good explanations

Joan,

The Oregon DEQ has been requiring organizations participating in our volunteer monitoring program to complete QAPP’s for about eight years. We are currently in the process of changing this system slightly. I have written a QAPP for the whole program which is awaiting approval by our QA Officer. Groups participating in the volunteer monitoring program will then need to write a Sampling and Analysis Plan (SAP) which will reference the blanket QAPP for issues that are consistent across the program (example data quality targets, methods, elements of data reporting, etc.). The purpose of the switch to SAPs is to emphasize project specific issues like monitoring questions and internal data management.

If you’d like more information about the QAPP’s we’ve used in the past you can visit our web page with resources for writing QAPPs. The switch to SAP’s will most likely not have a large impact on the process groups must go through to develop their plans. I can email you directly my draft blanket QAPP if you’d like to see it.

Steve Hanson
Volunteer Monitoring Specialist
Oregon DEQ Laboratory
Phone: 503.229.5449
Toll Free: 1.800.452.4011
Fax: 503.229.6957
email: hanson.steve@deq.state.or.us
2020 SW Fourth Ave. Suite 400
Portland, OR 97201

 

From: Cooke, Ken (EPPC DEP DOW) [mailto:Ken.Cooke@ky.gov]
Sent: Friday, July 22, 2005 3:32 PM
To: Volunteer water monitoring
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Helping program leaders write a QAPP – Need advice and good explanations

Hi,
Here is some information we give to our groups about Quality Assurance Project Plans for collecting samples for Fecal Coliform. The system was designed to meet the US EPA QAPP requirements for 319h funding and other programs.
Let me know if you have any questions, comments or suggestions!
Thanks,
Ken Cooke
KY Water Watch

 

Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 17:17:42 -0400
From: URI Watershed Watch
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Helping program leaders write a QAPP – Need advice and good explanations

I want to thank Alice for her mention of our Building Credibility factsheet, and wish to mention that several other similar factsheets of direct use to volunteer programs can be found via our project homepage (http://www.usawaterquality.org/volunteer/) – all of which contain many, many links to other excellent resources (some of which have already been mentioned here, and others which may be added from the several ones mentioned here!) In fact, in the Building Credibility factsheet there are sections that list a variety of Volunteer programs QAPPs that are available on-line as well as other guidance for developing QAPPs.

The URI Watershed Watch program has taken a similar approach to that of the Oregon DEP. We have a recently approved “generic” field sampling QAPP, a “generic” laboratory procedures QAPP (in the approval process), and will be producing or working with groups to develop project specific QAPPs that refer to the generic QAPPs, only covering project specific differences (i.e. monitoring sites, parameters, schedules, etc.) This will mean that groups working with us will have to focus on far fewer things in their own QAPPs.

Elizabeth Herron
Progam Coordinator
URI Watershed Watch
Phone: 401-874-4552
Fax: 401-874-4561
Web: http://www.uri.edu/ce/wq/

 

Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 08:57:18 -0400
From: Zevin.Paula@epamail.epa.gov
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Helping program leaders write a QAPP – Need advice and good explanations
Joan,

You may also want to check out our Region’s QAPP guidance.  It’s short and clearly written. If you feel panic rising at the amount of guidance and help that’s out there, don’t!  The QAPP is really akin to a roadmap, and like any good roadmap should contain the level of detail needed to get you “form her to there.”  In other words, you may not always need all the details and elements mentioned in the guidance(s), but make sure that you have the necessary ones.

Paula Zevin
Regional Volunteer Monitoring Coordinator
Division of Environmental Science and Assessment
U.S.E.P.A. – Region 2
2890 Woodbridge Avenue, MS-220
Edison, NJ 08837
Tel.: (732) 321-4456
Fax: (732) 321-6616
zevin.paula@epa.gov

 

Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 11:19:32 -0400
From: Marie-Françoise Walk
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Helping program leaders write a QAPP – Need advice and good explanations

Regarding QAPP writing assistance, you may want to check the Massachusetts Water Watch Partnership’s web site dedicated to this topic http://www.umass.edu/tei/mwwp/qapp.html, and take a look at the guidance manual we wrote to help volunteers write their own QAPP. I’m afraid it’s even longer than the EPA guidance manual, but it gives more detailed help. There are also links to state and sometimes EPA-approved QAPPs.
Marie-Françoise

Question 3

From: Joan Martin [mailto:jmartin@HRWC.ORG]
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 4:27 AM
To: Volunteer water monitoring
Subject: [volmonitor] Do you have Quality Assurance for thorough sampling of benthic macroinvertebrates?

We are teaching the directors of river monitoring programs to write Quality Assurance Project Plans (QAPP) and reviewing their attempts, which raises several questions. In using the QAPP, we are adapting a document designed for analytical, especially chemical, data to evaluate measurements that are imprecise and have variability built in to the dynamic river ecology system. Yet I recognize the need to verify that amateurs are collecting reliable data (and I think that state biologists should also verify their data).

The issue of reliable identification of macroinvertebrates is straightforward and has been thoroughly addressed in the recent issue of the Volunteer Monitor. I am particularly concerned with the act of collecting: verifying that the collecting team was thorough in sampling all the habitats and in finding and transferring the collected macroinvertebrates from the net into the jars of alcohol. I would love to hear from anyone who is assessing volunteer groups for this task and also, anyone who has language for this in a QAPP.

Thanks,

-Joan Martin
Huron River Watershed Council
Ann Arbor MI
(734) 769-5971

Responses to Question 3

From: Curtis.Hartenstine@state.co.us [mailto:Curtis.Hartenstine@state.co.us]
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 12:27 PM
To: Volunteer water monitoring
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Do you have Quality Assurance for thorough sampl ing of benthic macroinvertebrates?

Here at Colorado River Watch, we have volunteers collect macro invertebrate samples annually, in the fall low flow periods. Our bugs are identified by a Colorado Department of Health approved taxonomist. We have a QA plan for assessing the volunteer’s technique of transferring the bugs from the kick net into jars of alcohol (processing). All volunteers are charged with identifying sampling site, determining its bed morphology (as rocky or sandy) and then following the appropriate sampling technique for the rocky or sandy substrate. Processing of bugs from the net to jars of alcohol requires the volunteer to scour debris (large substrate, organics and inorganics) within the kick area during the kick and thoroughly pick through the collected sample for all bugs after the kicks are completed.

Volunteers do not include debris from the net that is dislodged during the kick unless they are collecting a QA sample. 10% of the volunteers are required to collect a QA sample where all the debris from the net (leaves, vegetation, woody debris, garbage etc.) is placed in a second jar of alcohol and sent to us. This QA sample is analyzed by our taxonomist to determine the effectiveness of the volunteers’ ability to process the sample.

For our water chemistry component, annual site visits are made to all of our 90+ active groups where we visually inspect technique and equipment and also quiz on sampling procedure. It is labor and time intensive, but we feel it to be a critical component to maintain QA/QC and also to sustain a personal relationship with our valued volunteers. Bi-annual unknown samples are also provided to each active group for analysis.

The following is the language in our QAPP that relates to the macro invertebrate topic.

1) A random 10% of macro invertebrate collections will have all sample material collected in the net sorted by the laboratory and all organisms identified. A “normal” sample will have field processed the majority of debris and substrate collected in the net, leaving little debris and mostly organism in the sample jar and only a 500 count organism identification.

Hope this is helpful; I would also like to hear how other programs manage and analyze the macro sampling techniques of volunteers in the field.

Thanks, Curtis

Curtis Hartenstine
Program Coordinator
River Watch
6060 Broadway
Denver, CO 80215
V/M (303) 291-7412
Fax (303) 291-7456

 

From: Peggy Savage [mailto:psavage@thewatershed.org]
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 10:25 AM
To: Volunteer water monitoring
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Do you have Quality Assurance for thorough sampling of benthic macroinvertebrates?

Hi Joan,
We have an EPA approved macroinvertebrate QAPP. There is not much in there about verifying the collection procedure, but I will pass on the little that we have:

“All field samplers consist of SBMWA and NJWSA staff and were trained in proper filed procedures in June 2004. Professional staff from the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), fluent with U.S. EPA and NJDEP protocols, conducted the training. The DRBC staff use the U.S. EPA rapid bioassessment protocols in their own U.S. EPA approved biological assessment program. The training session was held along a stream in the Spruce Run Reservoir Watershed that has been selected for restoration as part of this project. This site is representative of actual field conditions throughout the Raritan River Basin.

The focus of field training was on sampling safety, proper macroinvertebrate collection and field measurement/observation techniques, proper sorting procedures and how to properly complete all parts of the forms used in this assessment. Trained instructors performed these instructions via a combination of classroom lecture and hands-on demonstration of techniques. The samplers demonstrated proper sample collection and information gathering techniques and had trainees replicate those same techniques. While under the trainers’ supervision, any corrections that were needed in sampling technique of data collection were made immediately as they occurred with an explanation of proper biological assessment performance used to reinforce the proper procedures.”

I don’t know if that applies for you or not, but hopefully it will help. Good luck and take care — Peggy

 

Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 12:33:27 -0700
From: Erick Burres
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Do you have Quality Assurance for thorough sampling of benthic macroinvertebrates?

QAPPs can be found in the SWRCB’s SWAMP pages.
Erick

Erick Burres
Citizen Monitoring Coordinator- Southern California
SWRCB- Clean Water Team
Phone (213) 576-6788
Fax      (213) 576-6686
Cellular (213) 712-6862
LA-RWQCB
320 West 4th Street, Suite 200
Los Angeles, CA  90013

Question 4

Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 21:24:10 -0600
From: Richard Schrader
Subject: [volmonitor] geomorphology QAPP examples
To: Volunteer water monitoring

Hi all,

Does anybody have QAPP examples that include geomorphology examples?  I’m preparing a QAPP for the Rio Puerco Monitoring Project in New Mexico which is tracking sediment accumulation behind a variety of relatively small, bioengineered structures.  Cross-sections, longitudinal profiles and sinuosity are among the parameters measured.

Thanks, in advance.

Rich

Responses to Question 4

Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 12:46:00 -0400 (EDT)
From: NOLNACSJ@aol.com
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] geomorphology QAPP examples

This is a long shot, but I used to work at Battelle Ocean Sciences (many years ago and now the site has a different name) in Duxbury, MA which is part of Battelle Memorial Institute located in Columbus, Ohio (with other locations all over the USA and abroad). They do contract research in a multitude of disciplines. I remember we did some work, and had scientists who had technical expertise in geomorphology (though marine related), and we had an extensive QA/QC program. I did a quick search and found a QAPP for one of their larger environmental monitoring projects here in MA. It is not quite what you are looking for re. geomorphology, but you can contact one of the authors at the Battelle Duxbury site listed in the document, and I am sure they can help you track down who at Battelle may be involved in the type of research/work you are seeking re. your QAPP. I worked with Carlton Hunt (Project Mgr.) and Rosanna Buhl (QA Mgr.) and you are free to use my name as the person who recommended you contact them.

I have attached the link to the QAPP I found. Good luck!

Judy Scanlon
Orleans Water Quality Task Force
Volunteer Monitoring Coordinator

Question 5

Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2006 16:10:42 -0400
From: Joan Martin
Subject: [volmonitor] Part of a QAPP for volunteer benthic
macroinvertebrate monitoring

I am attempting to clarify the Data Quality Objectives (DQO’s) necessary for volunteer benthic macroinvertebrate monitoring, which does not have the precision that chemistry studies have. If you have a QAPP that includes DQO’s for benthic macroinvertebrate monitoring by volunteers, I would love to hear about the DQO’s or see them.

Thanks,
-Joan Martin
Huron River Watershed Council
Also, MiCorps, a state-wide volunteer monitoring program
(734) 769-5123, X.11

Question 5 Responses

Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2006 13:27:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: “J. Kelly Nolan”
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Part of a QAPP for volunteer benthic macroinvertebrate monitoring

The HBRW Guidance Document page 56 list the DQO for benthic sampling. You can download the document at this site:

http://www.hudsonbasin.org/dataxchange.html

 

Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2006 17:58:59 -0700
From: Erick Burres
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Part of a QAPP for volunteer benthic  macroinvertebrate monitoring

Joan,

Check the couple of bioassessment QAPP’s within the SWAMP webpages: www.waterboards.ca.gov

Erick

Categories
Listserv

Managing Volunteers

Question 1: Can anyone speak with respect to cutting costs and services without reducing support?

Question 2: Does anyone have any tips for getting volunteers to turn in their data?

Question 3:  I’m looking a great example of an actual volunteer job description.

Question 4: I wonder how your programs deal with insurance, liability, or “risk” in monitoring effluent dominated streams?

Question 5: Do any of the nonprofit organizations out there use volunteers in diving or snorkeling activities? 

Question 6: Are there liability insurace carriers that specialize in insuring volunteer watershed organizations?

Question 7:  How do we encourage a volunteer that continued monitoring is worthwhile? What small steps could be taken to make a difference?

Question 8: Can someone please suggest a way to get past the first step (collecting simple data/having awareness)?

Question 9: Anyone know of good ways to implement a program of assisting people to work as advisors with their local elected officials?

Article 1: Silent Streams by Mary Battiata

Question 10: Does anyone know how to get your volunteers to return equipment?

Question 1

Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 12:12:27 -0600
From: Jason Pinchback
Subject: [volmonitor] {{{cutting costs & services without reducing support for
volmons}}}

Greetings,

I am seeking advice on some ways to decrease costs and services without reducing program facilitation and volmon support.

Can you respond to any of the following points?

1. Do you think it’s reasonable for new volmons to print (pdf from website) the procedures manual (65pages) for their initial training and reference?

2. Do you charge volunteer monitors for their participation in your program? Did you try it and it worked…or not? How much to charge?

3. Do you charge volmons for equipment, reagents, etc? Does your program subsidize all or part of the equipment?

4. For those with on-line data entry…what percentage of volunteer monitors enter all of their data? Are there serious drawbacks from this approach? In Texas, I estimate 30% of our volmons are not computer wise; 30% of our monitors do not currently submit their collected data (via snail mail) in a timely manner. What’s your experience?

Any information or comments will be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Jason Pinchback
Texas Watch
JP30@txstate.edu
512 245 9148

Responses to Question 1

Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 12:26:24 -0500
From: “Filbert, Jennifer”
Subject: [volmonitor] RE: {{{cutting costs & services without reducing support for volmons}}}

#1- I think it is reasonable, although we do print the manuals for the volunteers.
We’re working on an online version though.

#2- we don’t charge anything

#3- for chemical monitoring (beyond just secchi), we require the volunteer to get a grant to participate. Our program gives out a limited number of grants/year. If they get a grant, equipment is provided at no charge.

In response to # 4:
For those with on-line data entry…what percentage of volunteer monitors enter all of their data? Are there serious drawbacks from this approach? In Texas, I estimate 30% of our volmons are not computer wise; 30% of our monitors do not currently submit their collected data (via snail mail) in a timely manner. What’s your experience?

#4 is nearest & dearest to what I work on most. We do have online data entry. I would say over half enter all of their data online. We had a form last year that emailed us the data. Then I had a program that manipulated it to get it into the database. This was somewhat time consuming on my end.

Also since the 1990s, we’ve had a telephone system where volunteers can call in their data by touch-tone phone. This works fairly well. The system has a few bugs, but mostly it works. We continue to run the phone system for people w/o the internet. We use Mastervox software. If you were interested, we could share our file that contains the design for our phone line. The other 50% of volunteers, or maybe 49% call in their data . So about 99% of our volunteers either call it in or enter it online.

With the online system, we went to a new form this year that requires a log in. This is somewhat more of a challenge for the less computer-savvy folks. The new system has a big advantage though: it puts the data directly into our database. Yet some volunteers miss the old system where they didn’t have to log in & it emailed us the data. The solution I plan to implement is to conduct a few trainings/year around the state on how to enter data & how to get the most out of our website. Maybe the morning would be “how to understand your data” and the afternoon a computer training.

Sometimes, when a volunteer isn’t computer literate, they have someone else on the lake, or their spouse, or granddaughter or grandson enter the data.

Ultimately, though, if they send it on paper, I still take it & find time to enter it in.

– Jennifer Filbert
Self-Help Lake Monitoring
Wisconsin DNR

 

Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 13:41:13 -0400
From: Nancy Hadley
Subject: [volmonitor] Re: {{{cutting costs & services without reducing support
for volmons}}}

On Jun 23, 2004, at 2:12 PM, Jason Pinchback wrote:

Greetings,

I am seeking advice on some ways to decrease costs and services without reducing program facilitation and volmon support.

Can you respond to any of the following points?

1. Do you think it’s reasonable for new volmons to print (pdf from website) the procedures manual (65pages) for their initial training and reference?

I dont think this is unreasonable but later you say your monitors are not computer savvy so how is that going to work.

2. Do you charge volunteer monitors for their participation in your program? Did you try it and it worked…or not? How much to charge?

No we do not charge and I cannot imagine they would pay.

3. Do you charge volmons for equipment, reagents, etc? Does your program subsidize all or part of the equipment?

No we supply all equipment and reagents. The volunteers do supply paper towels and distilled water.

4. For those with on-line data entry…what percentage of volunteer monitors enter all of their data? Are there serious drawbacks from this approach? In Texas, I estimate 30% of our volmons are not computer wise; 30% of our monitors do not currently submit their collected data (via snail mail) in a timely manner. What’s your experience?

Most of the volunteers who actually remember to go get the data do enter it. Those who are not comfortable with that fax us the data sheets or even snailmail them. The data that is entered appears to be entered correctly >90% of the time. A few people seem to stockpile their data and enter 6 months worth at a time which is a pain. I think the online data entry is very important because it gives volunteers more of a feeling that they are doing science. Our website also allows them to view the data in various formats and compare with other sites.
Of course we do have to check regularly for erroneous data and correct it. However I never suspect it was entered wrong – i think there was a faulty instrument or an inexperiencced operator.
Any information or comments will be greatly appreciated.

We solved some of the expense by establishing water monitoring equipment depots which several volunteers share.

Sincerely,

Jason Pinchback
Texas Watch
JP30@txstate.edu
512 245 9148

 

Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 13:41:43 -0400
From: Dennis
Subject: [volmonitor] Re: {{{cutting costs & services without reducing support
for volmons}}}

Hi Jason,

We do not charge our volunteers for anything. In fact, I try to find ways to thank them. This year we were fortunate enough to be able to give them each a mug in appreciation for last year’s help (this does not happen each year, though I wish I could do that!). If they weren’t out there early in the morning taking those samples, I would not have the data and would not have the program, so I try to make everything as volunteer friendly as possible. Perhaps if I had volunteers lining up at my door I would think differently, but until that happens, I try to keep them happy, and luckily they have been coming back year after year. I also enter all our data, with the help of interns. That way I can QC it before it goes out our door.

Good luck decreasing your costs, especially in these tight fiscal times! I do understand your dilemma!

Carolyn W. Sibner
Housatonic Valley Association
So. Lee, MA
hvama@bcn.net

 

Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 12:00:21 -0600
From: Barb.Horn@state.co.us
Subject: [volmonitor] RE: {{{cutting costs & services without reducing support for volmons}}}

This is for Colorado’s Rivers of Colorado Water Watch Program:

Barb Horn
Biologist, Colorado Division of Wildlife
151 E. 16th Ave., Durango, CO 81301
vc: 970/382-6667 fx: 970/247-4785

—–Original Message—–
From: Jason Pinchback [mailto:jason.pinchback@geo.swt.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2004 12:12 PM
To: VOLMONITOR
Subject: [volmonitor] {{{cutting costs & services without reducing support
for volmons}}}

Greetings,

I am seeking advice on some ways to decrease costs and services without reducing program facilitation and volmon support.

Can you respond to any of the following points?

1. Do you think it’s reasonable for new volmons to print (pdf from website) the procedures manual (65pages) for their initial training and reference?

NO–we found it prohibited quality training, we do require the download subsequent versions, we supply first copy

2. Do you charge volunteer monitors for their participation in your program? Did you try it and it worked…or not? How much to charge?–50$ to attend training, they supply some supplies and cost of shipping samples, we did a survey to see if

We would lose volunteers if we charged a membership fee, result was yes we would

3. Do you charge volmons for equipment, reagents, etc? Does your program subsidize all or part of the equipment?

No, we supply 90% of it, have to to meet quality assurance/control and data objectives for our data uses, maybe you don’t, function of data uses + data users needs.

4. For those with on-line data entry…what percentage of volunteer monitors enter all of their data? Are there serious drawbacks from this approach? In Texas, I estimate 30% of our volmons are not computer wise; 30% of our monitors do not currently submit their collected data (via snail mail) in a timely manner. What’s your experience?

We require it has a performance criteria in their contract, we get 80% compliance, when training was required it didn’t work or Cost was greater than benefit, now with web, it is not. We make data entry the last part of a sampling event, we make it as important as the sampling event itself. We require the hard copies to be sent to us so we can validate their entry and math errors, they are required to keep a copy of the data too.

Any information or comments will be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Jason Pinchback
Texas Watch
JP30@txstate.edu
512 245 9148
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 11:34:12 -0700
From: Eleanor Ely
Subject: [volmonitor] Re: {{{cutting costs & services without reducing support
for volmons}}}

Interesting questions! I hope people keep responding to the whole listserv because I’m interested in the responses, and I imagine others are too.

It sounds as if getting individual volunteers to pay could be problematic, but there are other approaches such as getting local businesses to adopt sites (and pay), getting financial support from local municipalities, homeowners associations, etc., who are interested in the data, getting corporate support … all of these ideas are covered in the upcoming issue of The Volunteer Monitor, which will be available in August.

Ellie

Eleanor Ely
Editor, The Volunteer Monitor Newsletter
50 Benton Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94112

 

Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 13:51:11 -0500
From: Steven Witmer
Subject: [volmonitor] RE: {{{cutting costs & services without reducing support
for volmons}}}

This is based on my own experience as a volunteer for the IOWATER program in Iowa.

1. Do you think it’s reasonable for new volmons to print (pdf from website) the procedures manual (65pages) for their initial training and reference?

IOWATER supplies their volunteers with a hard copy at the time of training. The manuals aren’t online yet but they’re working on it.

The main drawback I see to printing or downloading their own manuals is the one others have already rought up – how computer-savvy the volunteers are, and also the quality of their hardware. Someone with an older printer or computer may have a difficult time printing a hefty manual. You could always have hard copies available but encourage people to print their own.

One suggestion that might be helpful in encouraging people to print their own if the manual is online would be to have the manual broken down into sections. Someone with a dial-up connection will have an easier time of it if the files are ten smaller files rather than one big file of – that way if they just want to look at one or two sections they don’t have to wait ten minutes for their computer to bring up the entire thing.

2. Do you charge volunteer monitors for their participation in your program? Did you try it and it worked…or not? How much to charge?

IOWATER charges $25 for the basic training and $10 per advanced training module. Given that the basic training covers about a day and half and includes equipment, I felt that was very reasonable. There is no membership fee, only the training fees.

3. Do you charge volmons for equipment, reagents, etc? Does your program subsidize all or part of the equipment?

IOWATER volunteers receive their equipment as part of their training. Given the modest cost of the training, the IOWATER program subsidizes the vast majority of the cost of the training and equipment. The IOWATER program itself is operated under the Iowa Dept. of Natural Resources.

To cut down on costs, the program asks volunteers not to take equipment items during the training if they know they aren’t going to use them (for example, if they don’t intend to test for dissolved oxygen, then they should not take a DO test kit). Also, while they do replenish expired equipment or equipment that has been used up, as a requirement of doing so they require the volunteer to have submitted a certain minimum amount of data.

The last question on data submittal I’m afraid I can’t answer, but I know I’ve been guilty of waiting several weeks before submitting data to the program’s online database before. The online database does require a password and monitor id for security, but I’ve never found that to be a problem and think it’s pretty sensible. On my part the delay was more of an issue of my just needing to take the time to sit down and do the data entry.
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 15:32:37 -0400
From: URI Watershed Watch
Subject: [volmonitor] RE: {{{cutting costs & services without reducing support for volmons}}}

1. Do you think it’s reasonable for new volmons to print (pdf from website) the procedures manual (65pages) for their initial training and reference?

Jason, 65 pages seems like a lot to down load and print for your average volunteer (I know with my phone modem and printer at home it sure would be). However, if as mentioned earlier, there were short sections that folks could down load that would be more reasonable.

Our program (URI Watershed Watch) has its manual online and we suggest that potential volunteers take a look at it prior to attending our first classroom training. We provide a hard copy of the manual at the first training. But we do not hand it out until AFTER the first classroom session is complete (so they have a better sense of what they are getting into) and then provide it to only those who signup for the field training.

2. Do you charge volunteer monitors for their participation in your program? Did you try it and it worked…or not? How much to charge?

We do not charge our volunteers per se, but we do charge a registration fee per monitoring site that ranges from $250 to $600 per year depending on the site and the intensity of monitoring. This fee is paid for by a ‘sponsoring’ organization, typically a municipal conservation commission, lake or watershed association, Trout Unlimited, etc. Some sites are also covered under various project grants, as well as some money directly from our state environmental agency to support the program from which they get so much data. We also encourage the local sponsor to help coordinate “their” volunteers.

This system has worked very well for our program. In addition to providing much needed basic program support, the fee encourages the sponsoring agency to at least review the data, and hopefully put it to good use. In some cases this arrangement has helped local organizations to recruit new members who started out monitoring a waterbody that they were interested and through that sponsorship discovered that there was this group working to protect it.

3. Do you charge volmons for equipment, reagents, etc? Does your program subsidize all or part of the equipment?

Our program maintains ownership of all our equipment – and covers all of its cost. Each spring we hand out one set of monitoring supplies for each monitoring site (teams or partners sharing responsibility for an individual site have to make their own arrangements for sharing the equipment). Then in the fall all of the equipment is returned with the last set of water samples. We clean and recalibrate stuff, discard old reagents, etc, then repack everything in the spring….

4. For those with on-line data entry…what percentage of volunteer monitors enter all of their data? Are there serious drawbacks from this approach?

We have not gone to on-line data entry yet for 2 reasons. First – I’m not convinced that we have the level of technical support here on campus to support that. And second, after many years of dealing with the data entry errors of students which are generally fixable by reviewing the data postcard that the volunteer had mailed in, I’m still not comfortable not having a hard copy to refer back to. It’s just too easy to transpose numbers and without that paper you may never realize where the mistake was…

Good luck!

Elizabeth Herron
URI Watershed Watch
Phone: 401-874-4552
Fax: 401-874-4561
Web: http://www.uri.edu/ce/wq/

 

Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 12:55:40 -0700
From: Chrys Bertolotto
Subject: [volmonitor] Re: {{{cutting costs & services without reducing support for volmons}}}

We don’t charge volunteers a few: their service is their payment. I try very hard to articulate to decision makers the cost savings they are receiving by having volunteers collect data rather than consultants or staff. Of course, we could never get the data without volunteers (too few staff, too great cost).

I have worked with volunteers and paid interns with lower billing rates than permanent staff to prepare kits or coordinate volunteers. Both of these have helped to reduce cost and save staff time. For us, staff time availability is the big sticking point. Perhaps you could connect to a local university and try and secure interns.

Chrys Bertolotto
City of Issaquah Resource Conservation Office
Washington
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 10:34:34 -0500
From: SHELLY FULLER
Subject: [volmonitor] Re: {{{cutting costs & services without reducing support
for volmons}}}

This is from the Illinois EcoWatch Network’s perspective. I hope it helps.
See responses below..

Shelly Fuller
IL RiverWatch Program Coordinator
IL Department of Natural Resources
sfuller@dnrmail.state.il.us

>>> jason.pinchback@geo.swt.edu 6/23/2004 1:12:27 PM >>>

1. Do you think it’s reasonable for new volmons to print (pdf from website) the procedures manual (65pages) for their initial training and reference?

No. We feel the program should supply the manual & training materials as an issue of quality assurance. Our RiverWatch manual is bound & we supply new manuals to everyone on the rare occasion a new edition is printed. Our ForestWatch and PrairieWatch procedures are ever evolving so those manuals are placed in 3 hole punched report covers so replacement pages can be sent & downloaded from our site. Perhaps this method could help you cut costs.

2. Do you charge volunteer monitors for their participation in your program? No. Did you try it and it worked…or not? How much to charge? Years ago our surveys indicated some(but not all) were willing to pay $25-50 for training. We didn’t want cost to deter really dedicated people from participating so we don’t charge.

3. Do you charge volmons for equipment, reagents, etc? no Does your program subsidize all or part of the equipment? We conduct biological monitoring so no reagents are necessary. Kits cost around $125 and cost was considered when the equipment was selected several years ago. DNR owns ~ 90 stream kits which are housed at 60 loaner locations statewide. Several volunteers, nature centers, counties etc also own their own equipment and loan it to local volunteers.

4. For those with on-line data entry…what percentage of volunteer monitors enter all of their data? Are there serious drawbacks from this approach? In Texas, I estimate 30% of our volmons are not computer wise; 30% of our monitors do not currently submit their collected data (via snail mail) in a timely manner. What’s your experience?
We’ve had on-line data entry for several years. About 40% of our volunteers use it and that number is on the rise. It saves us tons of staff time. Time we use to do entry for those w/out access. I like it because we are able to standardize the formatting and have less QA cleaning up of the database later on. It also calculates the biological indicies which is a stress reliever for the volunteers. The site is super user friendly and we’re pretty happy with it.

Our on-line data entry by volunteers is optional but ALL volunteers must also submit their data sheets and samples or their data is rejected. They get 6 weeks from the end of the monitoring season. We verify all entry (volunteer & staff) with the hard copies and file the paperwork for safe keeping & future reference. Most volunteers are conditioned to adhere to the 6 week data submission period and it seems those who use on-line entry are equally timely in sending bug samples and data sheets as those who don’t use the on-line system.

The major down side is we have to pay for a programmer and we’ve had turn over in this position a couple of times . To save money we share this person with our professional monitoring staff so she stays pretty busy…which can be a hassle if any glitches arise and she’s busy with other projects.

If you’d like to see the site I can arrange temporary access. Again, this is for biological data so maybe it’s not what your looking for.

Let me know.

Any information or comments will be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Jason Pinchback
Texas Watch
JP30@txstate.edu
512 245 9148

 

Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2004 14:48:11 -0400
From: “Lamoreaux, Andrea M”
Subject: [volmonitor] RE: volmonitor digest: June 23, 2004

Hi Jason,

I coordinate the New Hampshire Deparment of Environmental Services Volunteer Lake Assessment Program (NHVLAP). In response to your questions regarding volunteer monitoring program costs, here is what we do with NHVLAP….

1. We provide one laminated, colored manual per volunteer monitoirng group at their initial training. If they would like additional copies, we ask them to go to our website and printoff a pdf manual.

2. We do not charge volunteers for training or annual NHDES biologist visits.

3. We loan sampling equipment out to volunteer monitors free of charge. Volunteers use equipment to collect water samples from the lake deep spot and tributaries. These water samples are brought to a NHDES approved VLAP laboratory where they are analyzed. Turbidity, pH,ANC, conductivity, chlorophyll, and plankton samples are run free of charge. The volunteers are charged $10 per total phosphorus and E.coli sample.

4. NHVLAP volunteers do not participate in on-line data entry. All data entry is conducted by DES Biologists and trained staff.

For more information about our program, please visit our website or feel free to contact me directly.

Thanks and good luck!

Andrea LaMoreaux
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Andrea LaMoreaux
Volunteer Lake Assessment Program Coordinator
New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services
PO Box 95
29 Hazen Drive
Concord, New Hampshire 03302-0095
Telephone: (603) 271-2658
Fax: (603) 271-7894
email: alamoreaux@des.state.nh.us

 

Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 11:46:44 -0400
From: Ginger North
Subject: [volmonitor] RE: {{{cutting costs & services without reducing support
for volmons}}}

I am sorry that my reply is so tardy but I have been out of the office.
#1. – We supply manuals free of charge, but have private industry donate the printing costs, so it does not cost us anything but the labor of writing it in the first place & editing it periodically.
#2. – We have done both charge & offer it for free. It doesn’t seem to make much difference in attendance. We currently offer it for free unless we are doing something special (like canoeing) in addition to the workshop.
#3. – We offer equipment to borrow for our stream adoption program. We supply all our technical monitors (the ones who monitor chemical parameters monthly) with equipment, supplies, refills, etc. free of charge. Again we get private industry to actually buy the equipment & supplies.
#4. – We do have technical volunteers enter their data electronically if they want. Probably 3/4 do – I now we are in the process of upgrading it & they cannot use it & they are quite upset about it. So I feel this is a positive & important part of supporting the volunteers. Volunteers who use snail mail vary widely in how prompt they are in submitting datasheets. Some do it every month & some hold onto it for 3 or 4 months.
I hope this helps.
Ginger North
Stream Watch Coordinator
Delaware Nature Society
302-239-2334×100
Fax 302-239-2473
ginger@dnsashland.org
www.delawarenaturesociety.org

Question 2

Date: Tuesday, July 18, 2006
From: “Kristine F. Stepenuck”
Subject: [volmonitor] Getting volunteers to turn data in

Hi folks-

I had a local coordinator for Wisconsin’s Water Action Volunteers’ stream monitoring program ask me if I had any tips for how to get people to turn in data that they are collecting.  He knows people are monitoring, but turning in their data to him doesn’t seem to be a priority for them.  We currently have an online database where most volunteers submit their data to a local coordinator who then enters it online. We’re working to have volunteers be able to enter their own data, but we haven’t quite gotten there yet.  I figured I’d see what suggestions you all might have to entice people to turn their data in.

Thanks!

Kris

Kris Stepenuck
WI Volunteer Stream Monitoring Coordinator and staff on Volunteer Water Monitoring National Facilitation Project
UW-Extension and WI Department of Natural Resources
210 Hiram Smith Hall
1545 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1289
Phone: 608-265-3887
Fax: 608-262-2031
http://clean-water.uwex.edu/wav
http://www.usawaterquality.org/volunteer

Responses to Question 2

From: Jopke, Peter [mailto:Jopke@co.dane.wi.us]
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 4:14 PM
To: Stepenuck, Kris F.
Subject: RE: getting people to give you their data

Hi Kris,

I usually threaten them with the d-frame net!!

I think the big thing is to keep them up to date on your overall efforts. In other words, by praising them all for their efforts, those that have been lagging must feel guilty and always send their data in shortly after such a message.  I also mention that the data they collect is indeed useful.  Maybe not right now but as the database grows, we may see some significant trends.

If I have not seen or heard from a monitor I will usually call them and ask how things are going and whether or not they are still monitoring. Sometimes they need a little encouragement to regenerate the interest.  I really believe coordinators are salespeople.  It is up to us to continue to stay in contact and sell our program.  If the end result is getting good quality data into the system, then we have succeeded.  Everyone’s personality is different.  My whole pitch starts with how much I appreciate their efforts and getting them to want to continue doing the monitoring. Some are much more reliable than others.  Thats just a fact of life in general.

I am not sure whether this helps or is just an editorial on my behalf.

Good Luck

Pete

 

From: Kay and Dave Fritz [mailto:kayndave@mhtc.net]
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 4:23 PM
To: Stepenuck, Kris F.
Subject: Re: getting people to give you their data

Kris,

We have two methods people use. Either e-mail or paper. Peggy provided paper copies and addressed envelopes at the training so it would be easy for people to mail them. I have a template some people us via e-mail, others write it as a narrative. I prefer the template because I have it laid out so it’s easy to enter data into your database.

Dave

 

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 14:55:00 -0400
From: “Andersen, Karen”
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Getting volunteers to turn data in

Hi Kris;

My name is Karen Andersen. I am the Laboratory/Program Director for the Friends of the Shenandoah River (FOSR) located in Virginia. The FOSR is a non-profit scientific organization dedicated to the preservation and restoration of the aquatic environment of the Shenandoah River and its tributaries. The FOSR has the only citizen volunteer water quality monitoring program and water quality analysis laboratory certified by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality in the state. The water quality parameters the waters are monitored for include; Ammonia, Ortho Phosphate, Nitrite-Nitrate, dissolved oxygen, pH, temperature, turbidity and E. coli (using the coliscan easy gel method). This effort is accomplished in cooperation with seven volunteer citizen monitoring organizations throughout the watershed and is recognized as the premier citizen volunteer water quality monitoring program in Virginia. Manned by over 100 volunteer monitors, water samples are collected twice a month throughout the year at more than 130 sites covering over 730 miles of river and tributary streams. The FOSR has an established “Volunteer Water Monitoring and Water Quality Analysis Quality Assurance Project Plan”. Included in this plan is a training and certification program for the volunteer water monitors.

Does your group have an established set of protocols for training, water monitoring and data recording, submission and chain of custody for the volunteers?

Is this a new position for you? Not to long ago a job announcement for a Watershed Coordinator position out there in Madison Wisconsin come across my desk. It was kind of funny because about the same time my daughter got accepted to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I told her was going to follow her out to Madison. She did not think it was so funny.

Karen Andersen
Program/Laboratory Director
Friends of the Shenandoah River
1460 University Drive
Winchester, VA 22601
(540) 665-1286
kanderse@su.edu

 

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 15:05:22 -0500
From: Jackson.Peter@epamail.epa.gov
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Getting volunteers to turn data in

Hi Kris,

Boy – good question! I am trying to recall what we did at IL EcoWatch. You may already be doing some of these. Let’s see…the first thing is to have a “firm” deadline that is widely- and frequently-publicized. By “firm”, I mean you talk a tough game but in reality you accept any (quality) data that come in! Then, we used to make a round of calls for people who were due to monitor but had not submitted by the deadline. Next, we used to use the “guilt” method – we would have a year-end volunteer appreciation event (we actually used to have several throughout the state but cut back to one or two statewide due to budget constraints in later years). At these events we would have food, speakers, awards etc. We also sent letters to let people know how valuable their data are. Another thing was to make data submission as easy as possible. We had online data entry available to the volunteers but still required them to send hard copy as backup (to verify the data etc). In addition, since they had to submit their macroinvertebrate samples in the case of RiverWatch (for verification), they had to send those in or drop them off. So we had places all around the state where they could drop off their data sheets and bug samples. State parks and community colleges, for instance. Then we would pick up the samples. I forget how many drop-off sites we had, it must have been 25-30. (We would monitor how many samples each site received to determine the best places to have these pick=up stations.)

In sum, we did all of the above. We still didn’t get ’em all, but we came close. Hope this helps! It is easier said than done, that’s for sure!

Pete Jackson
USEPA

 

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 15:20:46 -0500
From: “Sovell, Laurie”
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Getting volunteers to turn data in

Kris,

The ideas you’ve received so far line up with what we do in Minnesota – have a firm deadline, state it often, send a reminder letter to those who haven’t submitted data by a certain date, reward those who do submit data.

Two others come to mind:

1) Let people know that their data will not be included in a summary report (if one is generated) unless it is submitted by a certain “drop-dead” date.

2) If volunteers submit hard-copy data, provide a metered, self-addressed envelope along with program materials at the beginning of the season, so it’s easy for folks to send completed forms back to you.

Laurie

Laurie Sovell
Coordinator, Citizen Stream-Monitoring Program
MN Pollution Control Agency
520 Lafayette Rd. N.
St. Paul, MN 55155
651/296-7187 (phone)
651/297-8324 (fax)
laurie.sovell@pca.state.mn.us
http://www.pca.state.mn.us/water/csmp.html

 

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 17:05:24 -0400
From: Tracie Beasley
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Getting volunteers to turn data in

We are currently using paper forms. If you choose to do this, make sure your teams have easy access to self-addressed stamped envelopes (We put them in our stream monitoring kits). I’ve had 100% success over 3 seasons.

Also, make sure there is a team coordinator that is the responsible person for monitoring and make this responsibility clear. Good luck.

Tracie Beasley
Stewardship Director
Clinton River Watershed Council
101 Main St., Suite 100
Rochester, MI 48307
Phone 248-601-0606
Fax 248-601-1280
www.crwc.org

 

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 16:12:19 -0500
From: Tim Rielly
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Getting volunteers to turn data in

I think “entice” is the key word, I’ll try to make this short. The Missouri Stream Team Program offers incentives to volunteers who turn in water quality data and let us know any other activities they have been doing such as litter pick-ups or advocacy. We have an activity report that can be sent in as a hard copy or submitted electronically to the program. If they fill out this activity report they can request “thank you items” such as Stream Team t-shirts, lapel pins, temporary tattoos, etc for their efforts. They can also enter for an activity prize drawing which may be a large item such as a canoe or a “youth group prize”, which may be a pizza party. We use this activity reporting system to track activities over the year. Even though we are fortunate enough to be well funded by the sponsoring agencies and by fund raising, this system is still not perfect. We know that a large percentage of volunteers do litter pick-ups and do not ever report them. Or, they may collect water quality data and not turn it in for two or three years, if ever. I know its more work but you might try looking for local sponsors to donate prizes for prize drawings, on say a quarterly basis. Its worth a shot, offering an incentive or “carrot” does seem to help.

Good luck, we all feel your pain!

Tim Rielly
Volunteer Monitoring Coordinator
Missouri Department of Conservation
573-751-4115 ext. 3166

He also responded:

I always tell people what works for us may not work for you, different programs have different focuses.  We are up to 3119 Stream Teams with about 55,00 to 60,000 members.  Tracking what they do is a pain in the neck and is not a healthy job for a compulsive person.  Incentives do help to get them to turn in their activities but it will never be perfect

 

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 16:25:13 -0500
From: Jackson.Peter@epamail.epa.gov
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Getting volunteers to turn data in

I agree with Tim and others that “enticing” volunteers with tee-shirts etc is effective if you have the budget. They love the tee-shirts, plus it’s built-in advertising.

Pete Jackson
USEPA Region 5

 

Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2006 13:58:05 -0600
From: “Horn, Barb”
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Getting volunteers to turn data in

Kris-
For us getting data turned in is part of the training and an informal agreement the volunteer signs. We reclaim equipment if a volunteer does not meet our agreed upon 12 performance criteria. Folks can enter data on line and we include it as one of the steps in sampling-prep,collection, analyses, data entry, ship samples if relevant. We stress that if this whole continuum is not followed we cannot achieve our goals of protecting our streams. But we work hard up front in the training to make sure the volunteers know why we need the data and also why they are doing the sampling and that we can only succeed together. We have tried incentives for those that do succeed, most of them tell us it is not important or relevant because that is not why they are sampling. If it was important to them we would do more of it, but we ask each volunteer how they would like to be rewarded and why they are doing this, and we turn away volunteers that don’t have a common goal with us. We have volunteers sign an annual contract, that was their idea, that gives them a chance to quit and us a way to know exactly every year who is going to be committed and active..so we can look for replacements in areas to keep the data collection going. Good luck.

 

>>> Chris Riggert 07/20/06 10:20 AM >>>
Hi Kris!

Hope all is going well further north…hope it isn’t as hot as it is here this week (triple digits actual heat w/ index of around 120…I need to change my latitude or my altitude!)

We have had similar experiences in getting our volunteers to turn in activities in general (mainly litter pick-up events, letter writing, etc.). We estimated that last year we had approximately $2.4 million in volunteer effort…but that is based on just what is reported. Like the coordinator you mentioned, we know there is more stuff they are doing and not reporting.

However, I believe we have actually been fairly successful in having our volunteers turn in their data. I believe this is for a couple of reasons.

–> The first is that the volunteers are extremely dedicated and take ownership in their adopted site and stream. They really want to see their data posted on the Missouri Stream Team website. We also digitize their sampling location on an interactive mapping page as well. So they can find their site, click on it and see the data they collected.

–> The second is that we tell them up-front during the training sessions that their data gets used by local, county and state agencies and groups(particularly our Level 2 and 3 data).

–> Finally, we offer a “carrot.” Conducting and submitting WQM data is a Stream Team activity. They can get free “stuff” for volunteering their time on behalf of our stream resources (mainly t-shirts, mugs, key chains, etc.). Additionally they can be entered into a quarterly drawing for larger prizes (such as canoes, reference books, microscopes, camping equipment, etc.). I know this may not be an option for other volunteer groups across the nation. However, we have had pretty good luck in getting companies to donate larger items or gift cards (then we purchase the items) for the drawings.

I hope this helps!
Chris

 

From: Kris Stepenuck [mailto:kris.stepenuck@ces.uwex.edu]
Sent: Monday, July 24, 2006 3:44 PM
To: Horn, Barb
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Getting volunteers to turn data in

Hi Barb-

Hm, an annual contract. That’s intriguing. Are your data used by the state or for management purposes? I ask because our entry level – which was our only level until recently – is eductional, so it makes it more difficult to give a reason we need the information- though now with our upper levels of data use a contract makes a lot of sense. Do you have an e-copy of the contract that you could send me?

Thanks so much!

Kris

 

Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 17:13:24 -0600
From: “Horn, Barb”
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Getting volunteers to turn data in

I will attach our MOU. We do use the data for triennial reviews, 303d listing and other CWA processes, most of our volunteers do it for ecducation and the fact that we do something w/ it–they understand that we need x amount from them for them to have an educational experience..in otherwords we both have to lay out our expecatations and give to get—if you aren’t getting your needs met then it is likely they are not either and there needs to be some different sort of commitment and FU process. We have to reclaim the equipment and turn it around to serve the numbers we do w/ budgets, folks understand that others are waiting in line (even if they aren’t literally)–we create a demand (and perhaps a larger illusion of one, we know there are numerous folks who will do this work even if we haven’t met them yet–it frees us up to serve those that are performing w/ a high quality service vs using our time to track down semi-performers… We chose not to have a tiered program but to get the same quality data from everyone who participates so we can make statewide statements about the results in each basin because everyone is doing the same thing …call me if you want any more info and good luck.

We ask folks to commit to the 12 performance criteria..if they do, they are automatically in program next year. If not, if we have to cut folks those that perform are in above those that don’t but tells us who are above those who don’t perform and don’t tell us. They have to commit do sample one station for one year each month for field parameters and metals, 2/yr for nutrients, 1/yr for bugs and physhab and then other qaqc type of criteria. We do the analyses for metals and nutrients and have a taxonomist to bug id—all so we can use data at health dept. The value of our volunteers is that they are in the field and we aren’t.

Nothing is perfect, but we are 15 years into it and this has served us well. We now have 2 contracts, one for schools and one for watershed groups that tend to have more goals than schools.

WSGContract2005.pdf

Contract2006.pdf

Barb Horn
Biologist, Colorado Division of Wildlife
151 E. 16th Ave., Durango, CO 81301
vc: 970/382-6667 fx: 970/247-4785

 

Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 08:48:02 -0500
From: Chris Riggert
Subject: Re: [CSREESVolMon] Getting volunteers to turn data in

Hi Kris,

Paul also pointed out to me that we require the volunteers to submit invertebrate and visual survey data before coming to the next level of training (where they get the chemical “stuff”).

We used to teach the equivalent of our Introduction and Level 1 classes as one workshop. People’s brains were too full, they were overwhelmed, and we weren’t getting the return for providing them with ALL of the equipment up front. We have seen a greater return by having them attend the Introduction workshop and just do the bugs and visual survey to get an idea of what kind of commitment they are getting themselves into. This has also saved us quite a bit of funds b/c those that realize it is a bit too much time, etc. don’t come to the next level of training, so we are better able to utilize our monies providing kits to a greater percentage of people that will actually use it and turn in their data to us.

If you have any other questions, please do not hesitate to give either Tim or myself a shout!
Chris

Christopher M. Riggert
Fisheries Biologist – Stream Unit
Missouri Department of Conservation
2901 W. Truman Blvd.
Jefferson City, MO 65109
Phone: (573) 522-4115 ext. 3167
Fax: (573) 526-0990
Chris.Riggert@mdc.mo.gov

 

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 13:41:00 -0500
From: William Deutsch
Subject: Re: [CSREESVolMon] Getting volunteers to turn data in

Hi Kris,
In AWW, we replace every monitor’s chemical reagents for free, if they submit at least nine months of data per year. That gets the forms coming in! For less than nine months, we replace broken glassware and thermometers but the monitor or group has to purchase the reagents. The online data entry feature will also appeal to many volunteers and about 80% of our data comes in that way now.

It’s amazing to me how some monitors will test a site for months without all that much concern about data submission and use. It shows how we coordinators sometimes prioritze things differently than the
volunteers.

 

From: Dana Oleskiewicz
Subject: Re: [CSREESVolMon] Getting volunteers to turn data in
To: Kris Stepenuck

Competition often is an incentive….first to submit, greatest number of data, etc…

 

Other unique answers received:

Bribe them with beer.

Beatings?

Send out Guido & Rocky and knocks some heads! -Tony Soprano

Question 3

From: Danielle Donkersloot [mailto:Danielle.Donkersloot@dep.state.nj.us]
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 2:57 PM
To: Volunteer water monitoring
Subject: [volmonitor] looking for job description

Hello Everyone: I’m looking a great example of a volunteer job description. Not how to write one, but actual descriptions that you have used before. Thanks

Responses to Question 3

Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2005 11:35:59 -0400
From: “Barrar, Heather”
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] looking for job description

The AVA (Association for Volunteer Administration) has some examples – of course they aren’t water quality specific, but a good resource. To those of you not familiar with AVA, I’ve found my local chapter to be a great place to network and find support. While there aren’t many other volunteer administrators in my local chapter that deal with environmental issues, they all have great advise for overall program
management.

Heather

>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>Heather Barrar
>Environmental Volunteer Coordinator
>
>Chesterfield County
>Office of Water Quality
>P. O. Box 40
>Chesterfield, VA 23832
>(804) 748-1920
>(804) 768-8629 (Fax)

 

Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2005 13:34:02 -0400
From: URI Watershed Watch
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] looking for job description

Well I don’t know if this is a great description, but it is one that we used – and we did get a good group of people for this project…

Maskerchugg River Project

Project Title: Development of a Citizen Watershed Monitoring and Public Education Program for the Maskerchugg River

Job Title: Maskerchugg Watershed Volunteer Monitor

Reports to: Linda T. Green, Director, URI Watershed Watch
Elizabeth Herron, Clean Lakes Coordinator, URI Watershed Watch

Purpose Assess condition of the Maskerchugg River watershed and
current water quality conditions.

Volunteer responsibilities may include some of the following:
. Collecting water samples
. Measuring stream flow
. Conducting shoreline and river habitat assessments
. Performing watershed surveys
. Report to project director or local coordinator

Volunteer qualifications:
. No science background is needed!
. Ability to walk along river banks or side walks
. Enjoyment of the outdoors
. Concern for the community and its environment

Training provided by URI Watershed Watch:
. Sessions on measuring stream flow, shoreline and river habitat assessment
. Training to perform watershed or “windshield” surveys
. Protocols for collecting water samples

URI Watershed Watch
Phone: 401-874-4552
Fax: 401-874-4561
Web: http://www.uri.edu/ce/wq/

Question 4

From: Kris Stepenuck
Subject: [CSREESVolMon] Liabiltiy insurance for volunteers?
To: volmonitor@lists.epa.gov, csreesvolmon@lists.uwex.edu

Hi all

I was asked a good question by a colleague about liability insurance and volunteer monitors. I thought it would be useful to hear your input about how the issue is dealt with in your program. Specifically, I wonder how your programs deal with insurance, liability, or “risk” in monitoring effluent dominated streams? Also, do you have insurance for volunteers in water quality monitoring in general?

Thanks so much everyone!

Kris Stepenuck
Water Action Volunteers/ Volunteer Stream Monitoring Coordinator
UW-Extension and WI Department of Natural Resources
210 Hiram Smith Hall
1545 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1289|
Phone: 608-265-3887
Fax: 608-262-2031

Responses to Question 4

Subject: [volmonitor] Regarding Liability Insurance
To: Volunteer water monitoring

Regarding Liability Insurance:

Our watershed group has Directors and Officers Insurance, and Liability Insurance which is general, from a private insurance agent. We added insurance for volunteer water monitoring. At the time I inquired around and found that there was an insurance company specifically for watershed and environmental groups. I got the paperwork and had everyone look it over.

The application was very detailed and regrettably our people did not want to be bothered. Although it would have been less expensive, and in the long run would have been better for our group to switch all of our insurance to this group, they would not go through the application and complete it.

The following year they reviewed all information and stayed with a private carrier for same reason. The policy we have is general for nonprofits and not specific for some of the needs we have.

I would suggest inquiring [about a policy called] Conserve-A-Nation. See http://www.alliantinsurance.com/services/specialty/MoreIndustries/nonprofit/conserveanation/default.aspx

Additionally I have all volunteers sign a waiver. If they are under age 18, their parents, as well as the younger person, must sign. They are required to read it and not just sign it. I go over safety precautions
very often, and in this state where Lyme disease is rampant, I have a separate set of precautions for that which In INSIST on.

[Volunteers] sign a statement about data collection and a statement that they have read and understood the safety precautions that we review and that are in their manual.

Additionally volunteers are covered theoretically under the National Volunteer Protection Act of 1997 and

New Jersey has a Volunteer Protection Act, which is more rigorous. For information on both NJ and Federal acts see http://www.njnonprofits.org/vol_protect_act.html

“Another section of the immunity law (N.J.S.A. 2A:53A-7.1) provides that uncompensated volunteers, trustees and officers are not liable for damages related to their services on behalf of charitable non-profits, in cases of ordinary negligence. No distinction is made between recipients of the non-profits’ services and strangers, meaning that unpaid trustees, officers and volunteers are covered in their individual capacities regardless of whether the person suffering damages is a beneficiary of the group’s services.”

The above page from The Center for Nonprofits gives an insurance discussion.

There is also an article about Liability in an older issue of The Volunteer Monitor, EPA’s publication -see The Volunteer Monitor, Volume 8, No. 1, Spring 1996 “Liability Insurance & Waivers” http://www.epa.gov/owow/monitoring/volunteer/issues.htm

Does this mean we have covered all bases?

Likely not.

[signature removed for privacy purposes]

example WAIVER and other materials from respondent:

I hereby acknowledge that I am fully informed about the possible risks and potential for injury or loss to myself and to my personal or real property associated with activities and participation in the [sponsoring program name here] (“the Program”). Such risks may include, but are not limited to, those associated with water-sampling, water-related activities, equipment usage and handling, adverse weather conditions, other natural conditions, and exposure to the outdoor environment and the like. I acknowledge that the [participating sponsoring agencies here] shall not be responsible for any loss or claims to myself or my property, and shall in no event be construed to have assumed any duty to me or my property by virtue of my participation in the Program. I also understand that I am not considered to be an employee, agent or representative of the [participating sponsoring agencies here] and agree not to hold myself out as such to other persons. I have read and understood safety precautions and outdoor precautions (initial and date)
______________________________________

Knowing these facts, and in consideration of your accepting my entry into the citizen volunteer program, I hereby expressly assume all risks and liability for injury or damage caused to myself or to my property. I (or my parents, guardians or responsible adults if a minor) assume liability for all injuries or damage caused by myself to others or their property. I further, for myself, my heirs and my executors, covenant not to sue and waive, release and discharge the[participating sponsoring agencies here] and any supporting organizations, and their agents, representatives, volunteer leaders or officers, assigns or anyone lawfully acting on their behalf from any and all claims, damages, losses, demands, and actions f any kind whatsoever, foreseen or unforeseen, which in any manner arise out of or in the course of my participation in [participating sponsoring agencies here] and related activities.

Name (print): ____________________________ Date: _____________________ (print)

Date of Birth:_____________ Signature _______________________________

Street
Address_________________________________________________________

City, State, Zip ____________________________________________________

Attn: Parent or Guardian If student is under 18, please complete this section to allow volunteer monitoring

I hereby give my permission for my child to participate in the activities of the [participating sponsoring agencies here] and endorse the waiver as stated above.

Print parent name______________________________Signature________________________________

DATE: _______________________________ (print)

The following statement of commitment must be read and signed by each volunteer as a condition of participation:

As a volunteer monitor working with [participating sponsoring agencies here], I commit myself to the collection of accurate, objective, environmental information. The data that I collect will be provided to the team representatives as soon as possible after I collect it. I commit to monitoring my sample sites, using procedures and timing that has been specified to me. I agree that I will conduct my environmental monitoring in a safe way that will protect myself and those people working with or near me from harm. I also agree that I will obey all appropriate state and federal laws and not trespass on private property in order to collect my environmental monitoring data. I agree that I will only monitor at my approved site, on my approved date and time only. I agree I will always monitor in the company of another person and never alone.

__________________________________ Organization: __________________________
(signed)

__________________________________ DATE: _______________________________
(print)

EQUIPMENT LOAN AGREEMENT

I, for myself, my heir(s), and executors do hereby assume responsibility for the safety and care of all equipment, materials and supplies loaned or entrusted to me, and agree to transport, store and use such equipment, materials and/or supplies in a prudent and reasonable manner; to take such action as necessary to reduce the possibility of damage to, of, or from such equipment, materials, and/or supplies. I agree upon verbal or written demand of the [sponsoring organization here] or their authorized representative, to return said equipment, materials, and/or supplies within five working
days of such demand, to the [sponsoring organization]. I further grant full permission to the [sponsoring organization] to the use of my name and any videos, photographs, or similar records in which I appear or which may reveal my name or disclose my identity.

NAME: __________________________ Organization: _________________________

(signed) _____________________ DATE: ____________________________ (print)

VOLUNTEER SAFETY STATEMENT

I have read and understood the [sponsoring organiation] Safety Precautions

_________________________________________Signature __________________Date

 

Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 09:14:39 -0400
From: Angela McCracken
Subject: RE: SPAM-LOW: [volmonitor] Liabiltiy insurance for volunteers?

Hello everyone,

A few years ago, we surveyed watershed groups asking what they needed in terms of business and organizational support. Their response was general liability insurance, so we found an insurance company that allows us to add endorsements to our general liability insurance policy. We have been working with Roy Klauber, formerly of Marsh Advantage, now with Glatfelter to add these endorsements. We have been successful at administering this program at an affordable price to watershed groups.

We, here at PA Watersheds and Rivers, have a general liability insurance program for incorporated watershed groups who are members of PA Watersheds. The policy covers groups against third-party claims such as the classic “slip and fall” injury. It also covers claims of libel and slander with respect to publications and press interviews. It does NOT cover or replace D&O policies, insure automobiles or watercraft, cover on-the-water events, such as sojourns or canoe trips, or cover workers compensation. With respect to monitoring specifically, it would cover any monitoring occurring in the stream or on the embankment, but only if it is NOT performed out of a boat. In other words, you can’t be in a canoe monitoring and be covered by this policy. This was a real quick and dirty of our policy so I’m sure folks will have questions. If you do, please either respond to me (amccracken@pawatersheds.org), or to John Coutts, who is our Director of Business Systems and insurance guy. His e-mail is jcoutts@pawatersheds.org. His phone number is the same as below. Also, there is more information on our website, www.pawatersheds.org.

The cost of this insurance was kept as low as possible for the sake of the watershed groups. The costs for 2005-06 are:
# of members X $.52 = $_________ (or $104 minimum)
PA Watersheds Administrative Fee = $100
PA Watersheds Membership Fee = $30

Again, please let me know if there are any questions, and I will answer them the best I can.

Regards,
Angie

Angela M. McCracken
Program Coordinator
Pennsylvania Organization for Watersheds and Rivers
610 North Third Street
Harrisburg, PA 17101
(717) 234-7910 – phone
(717) 234-7929 – fax
amccracken@pawatersheds.org

 

Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 09:34:55 -0400
From: Tony Williams
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Liabiltiy insurance for volunteers?

Yes, we have insurance in general for our water quality monitoring volunteers.

Tony Williams
Water Monitoring Coordinator
The Coalition for Buzzards Bay
Nashawena Mills – 620 Belleville Avenue
New Bedford, Massachusetts 02745
Tel. 508-999-6363 x.203
Fax. 508-984-7913
e-mail: williams@savebuzzardsbay.org
www.savebuzzardsbay.org

 

Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 08:48:36 -0500
From: Michael D Smolen
Subject: Re: [CSREESVolMon] Liabiltiy insurance for volunteers?

I checked with Cheryl Cheadle, the State Blue Thumb Coordinator on this. Cheryl says that all Blue Thumb volunteers are also NRCS Earth Team Volunteers. This allows them to come under workmans comp. It benefits NRCS because they can report the volunteer hours. I believe the volunteer hours may also be reported as part of the match on 319 projects.

Michael D. Smolen
218 Ag Hall
Stillwater, OK 74078-6021
phone: 405-744-8414
Fax: 405-744-6059
http://waterquality.okstate.edu

 

Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 09:10:51 -0800
From: streamkeepers
Subject: [Az_wqmonitoring] RE: [CSREESVolMon] Liabiltiy insurance for
volunteers?

The County government that we’re part of is self-insured, and we insure all our volunteers for both “excess medical” (i.e., beyond their own insurance) and non-negligent liability. Volunteers must go through a one-hour orientation on safety and County policies before they’re covered under this insurance. There’s a whole packet of information they get and some stuff they have to sign. We also have a “Know Before You Go” section in our volunteer handbook that addresses some safety and liability issues. We haven’t had a claim in 8 years; and fortunately, we don’t generally have effluent problems in our streams.

Ed Chadd & Hannah Merrill, co-managers
Streamkeepers of Clallam County
Clallam County Department of Community Development
223 E. 4 St., Suite 5
Port Angeles, WA 98362
360-417-2281; FAX 360-417-2443
streamkeepers@co.clallam.wa.us
www.clallam.net/streamkeepers

 

Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 10:22:08 -0700
From: Eleanor Ely
Subject: [Az_wqmonitoring] RE: [CSREESVolMon] Liabiltiy insurance for
volunteers?

Just curious — are there any volunteer monitoring programs that have actually needed to use liability insurance for a volunteer monitoring-related lawsuit? It is my impression that volunteer monitors virtually never sue the organizations for which they are volunteering. Is this true?

Medical insurance could be a different matter — I could imagine it being used if a volunteer who had no other insurance was injured while volunteering. Are there any volunteer monitoring programs that have needed to use medical insurance for a volunteer monitor?

Ellie

Eleanor Ely
Editor, The Volunteer Monitor Newsletter
50 Benton Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94112

 

Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 14:05:43 -0400
From: Scott Kishbaugh
Subject: RE:[volmonitor] [CSREESVolMon] Liabiltiy insurance for volunteers?

All of the volunteers that participate in the NY Citizens Statewide Lake Assessment Program (CSLAP) are required to sign a Release of Claims / Waiver of Liability form that was approved by the state Attorney General’s office. While it is not iron-clad (and probably not completely lawyer proof), we have yet to face a liability issue from any of our > 1300 volunteers.

Scott

Scott A. Kishbaugh, P.E.
Environmental Engineer II
Lake Services Section
Bureau of Water Assessment and Management
NYSDEC Division of Water
625 Broadway, 4th Floor
Albany, NY 12233-3502
(phone) 518-402-8282
(fax) 518-402-9029
(email) sakishba@gw.dec.state.ny.us

 

From: Eleanor Ely
Subject: [volmonitor] liability insurance
To: Volunteer water monitoring

Below is a comment on the insurance question that was sent directly to me by Ken Cooke. He is unable to post directly to the listserv so I am forwarding his message on his behalf.
— Ellie Ely

Eleanor Ely
Editor, The Volunteer Monitor Newsletter
50 Benton Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94112

Hi,

That is a good question, has there been a need for the insurance in our profession.

More specifically, has any group actually “filed a claim” under their D and O or general liability insurance.

And, if so, what was the outcome of that filing? (payout, denial etc…)

They may not be able to give you the details of a payout. (such as amount) due to confidentiality clauses in insurance settlements.

Water Watch has not had a claim against it in its 20 year history. We have had injuries (particularly during clean ups from broken glass, stings, lacerations, broken bones from falls etc…) But, no one has
considered coming after us for money. That might change if they knew we had insurance!

I can’t send a question/message directly to the list serv due to our state government e-mail proxy system, so I have to ask you directly.

Thanks

Ken Cooke
KY Water Watch
Ken.Cooke@ky.gov

 

Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 15:31:56 -0400
From: Danielle Donkersloot
Subject: [volmonitor] Fwd: RE: liability

Ellie thought everyone may be interested in this so I’m passing it along.

In the land of lawsuits, a volunteer in NJ did in fact get sued.

This volunteer works for the NJ Fish and Wildlife Service’s Volunteer Corp monitoring terrestrial species. He found an endangered species near a parking lot at a zoo. He filed a “spotting” report with Fish and Wildlife. The zoo was expanding the parking lot but because of his findings, they couldn’t get the permission. So the zoo actually sued the volunteer. There was a huge debate about this going on in the press, but ultimately, the volunteer was covered by the State’s lawyers in court. There are many more details to this story, but the bottom line is that we will never know when we will need the insurance, or what our volunteers may find in the field.

 

Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 14:04:41 -0600
From: Laurie Fisher
Subject: RE:[volmonitor] [CSREESVolMon] Liabiltiy insurance for volunteers?

(in response to Ellie’s question)

The issue may be less on the part of the volunteers themselves than where the organization gets its funding. In Colorado, if the State passes through (i.e., contracts) funds to any private organization
(nonprofit or otherwise) we require the organization to carry $1 million in liability insurance.

 

Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 17:15:50 -0400
From: URI Watershed Watch
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] [CSREESVolMon] Liabiltiy insurance for volunteers?

We have a similar waiver form that our volunteers sign (vetted by the university lawyers). Essentially it informs the volunteers that they are NOT considered employees of the university and thus not covered by their insurance and that unless we do something really negligent that they can’t sue the university. We have had only one very minor injury (a minor chemical burn) so have never had anyone even suggest that they intended to make a liability claim. We do have an insurance policy for a small boat that we use to train volunteers and for monitoring by our student staff. This is a recent requirement of the university, which realized that its small boat fleet was not covered under their other policy.

Ellie, like you I have never heard of a volunteer monitor that pursued a legal liability against a program (nor have I heard of any serious associated illnesses or injuries) although it remains a source of concern to boards and agencies alike.

Elizabeth Herron
URI Watershed Watch
Phone: 401-874-4552
Fax: 401-874-4561
Web: http://www.uri.edu/ce/wq/

 

Date: Fri, 20 May 2005 09:04:44 -0400
From: Kimberly Morris-Zarneke
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Liability insurance for volunteers?

Kris – Here is Georgia, since the program is a state run volunteer program, all Adopt-A-Stream trainers, advisory board members, and state coordinators are covered by the Georgia Torte Claims Act of 1990. Which means as long as we have a structured program that includes trainer training and trainers submitting workshop participant lists, their liability is covered by the state. This coverage does not extend to volunteers. In our training workshops and manuals we have a whole safety component that tells people to collect sample at a safe, legal site and not to wait in during storm events. From what I have been told if a volunteer goes out and get hurt while voluntarily monitoring they be covered by their own personal insurance.

There is a federal version of the Torte Claims act the covers federal employees too so you may want to check and see as a state program if your state has adopted this act. FYI – Torte Claims Act mean one can not sue a state employee for you are suing the state itself.

Hope this helps. Kim

Kim Morris-Zarneke
Adopt-A-Stream Coordinator
Dept of Natural Resources
Environmental Protection Division
4220 International Parkway, Suite 101
Atlanta, GA 30354
ph: 404-675-1636
fax: 404-675-6245
email: kimberly_morris-zarneke@dnr.state.ga.us
www.riversalive.org/aas.htm

 

Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 14:15:55 -0500
From: Tim Rielly
Subject: Re: [CSREESVolMon] Liabiltiy insurance for volunteers?

Hey Kris,

Since we are a state agency so we are self insured. In the first workshop (they are in a series) we do have them sign a liability waiver in case they stub their toe. We have had no liability issues in the 11
years of this program and work hard to keep it that way.

Take care!

Tim Rielly
Volunteer Monitoring Coordinator
Missouri Department of Conservation
573-751-4115 ext. 3166

 

Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 09:53:08 -0400
From: John Murphy
Subject: [volmonitor] Liabiltiy insurance for volunteers

Colleagues,

We insure our volunteers through NRCS’s Earth Team program (http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/feature/volunteers/vol/facts.html). Our local Soil and Water Conservation District is the liason.

I think Earth Team could be an option for other monitoring groups who are affiliated with SWCDs.

John Murphy, Director
StreamWatch
streamwatch@cstone.net
office: (434) 923-8642
cell: (434) 242-1145
www.streamwatch.org

 

Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 15:25:39 -0700
From: Eleanor Ely
Subject: RE:[volmonitor] [Partners] Liability Insurance

The Spring 1996 issue of The Volunteer Monitor newsletter has an article on insurance and waivers. It’s probably somewhat out of date but hopefully
still useful. You can find the issue online at www.epa.gov/owow/volunteer/vm_index.html.

Ellie

Eleanor Ely
Editor, The Volunteer Monitor Newsletter
50 Benton Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94112

 

From: Kevin Erb
Subject: FW: do you have volunteer insurance?
To: kris.stepenuck@ces.uwex.edu
Cc: betty.stibbe@wi.usda.gov, kim.cupery@wi.usda.gov

Kris-

Insurance protection is available via USDA NRCS’s Earth Team volunteer program, which provides workman’s comp/tort liability for volunteers over 14 years old. Contact Kim Cupery or Betty Stibbe at NRCS (see email above) for details

Kevin

Question 5

Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 23:54:13 +0000
From: Jill Komoto
Subject: [volmonitor] Volunteers and General Liability

I see that this was a topic a while back in the Volunteer Monitoring newsletter but wanted to pose this question again. Do any of the nonprofit organizations out there use volunteers in diving or snorkeling activities? Do you have general liability insurance? I am looking for insurance companies that have dealt specifically with these types of activities with volunteers.

Thanks!
Jill Komoto
Malama Kai Foundation

Responses to Question 5

Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 17:23:19 -0700
From: Erick Burres
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Volunteers and General Liability

Jill,
The California CoastKeepers had/has a Kelp Restoration Program that utilized divers. Tom Ford ran the program for Santa Monica (Baykeepers http://www.smbaykeeper.org/). Martin Carreon with Divers Involved Voluntarilty in Environmental Rehabilitation and Safety (http://www.ecodivers.org/) does several activities such as cleanps with divers and Reef Check Reef Check (http://www.reefcheck.org/default.php) conducts bio-surveys with divers.

Hope this helps,

Erick Burres
Citizen Monitoring Coordinator
SWRCB- Clean Water Team

You can self-subscribe to the Clean Water Team’s E-Mailing List. To subscribe visit
http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/lyrisforms/swrcb_subscribe.html and check the box marked
Citizen Monitoring Program/Clean Water Team.

Contact me at:
Desk (213) 576-6788
Cell (213) 712-6862
Fax (213) 576-6686

LA-RWQCB
320 West 4th Street, Suite 200
Los Angeles, CA 90013

Question 6

>>> 3/24/2009 12:51 PM >>>

I am interested in finding out if there are any liability insurance
carriers out there that specialize in insuring volunteer watershed
organizations and/or may do so at a reduced rate. Does anyone use
such a company and, if so, could you send me any info/recommendations? I
know of a fledgling local watershed organization interested in
liability insurance to cover its members and events, such as cleanups. Since it
is not affiliated with NRCS, I don’t believe this group can be covered
under the Earth Team policy. It is also not affiliated with a state
or county government.

I did look at the thread on this topic in the archived listserve discussions at http://www.usawaterquality.org/volunteer/Special/EPAListserv/Liability.htm, and most of the links no longer work. (Editor’s note: All links above checked and updated Fall 2010.)

Any guidance appreciated! Thanks.

Alice Mayio
USEPA Office of Water
Phone: 202-566-1184, Fax: 202-566-1437
Mail: 1200 Pennsylvania Ave NW (4503T), Washington, DC 20460
Delivery: 1301 Constitution Ave NW (Rm7330Q), Washington, DC 20460

Responses to Question 6

From: Russell Schell [mailto:ruskjel@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2009 4:18 PM
To: Volunteer water monitoring
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] liability insurance for volunteer programs

Check out the CIMA Companies which has a Volunteers Insurance Service Association offering, 1800 No Beauregard St’ Suite 100, Alexandria, VA,22311, www.cimaworld.com Russell Schell

 

From: Lauren Webster [mailto:Lauren@paxriverkeeper.org]
Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2009 5:04 PM
To: Volunteer water monitoring
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] liability insurance for volunteer programs

Check out Alliance of Nonprofits for Insurance at https://www.ani-rrg.org/. They focus exclusively on nonprofit groups and have good rates.

———————————————————————————-

Lauren Webster
Restoration Coordinator
Patuxent Riverkeeper
(301) 249-8200 ext 6
18600 Queen Anne Road
Upper Marlboro MD 20774
(Fax) 301-249-3613

 

—–Original Message—–
From: Erick Burres [mailto:eburres@waterboards.ca.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 1:19 AM
To: Volunteer water monitoring
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] liability insurance for volunteer programs

Alice,

Here in California there are many insurance providers that cover the many diverse non-profit organizations located here. None specialize in watershed activities, but they can work with a group to ensure proper coverages.

I cannot and do not endorse any company, products or services. Here is a small sampling of what anyone can find:

Nonprofits??? Insurance Alliance of California is a provider of liability insurance for organizations in California. News, coverage and membership information. www.niac.org

CAN Insurance Services provides insurance tailored to California nonprofit organizations, including health, dental, vision, workers’ comp, liability and … www.caninsurance.com/

Alliance of Nonprofits for Insurance Risk Retention Group Insurance provider owned and controlled by its member nonprofits, serving United States nonprofits. Coverage, membership information and resources.
www.ani-rrg.org/

California Nonprofit Insurance Alliance of California … www.aspirationtech.org/blog/nonprofitoperations/insurance1

Sincerely,
Erick Burres
Citizen Monitoring Coordinator
SWRCB- Clean Water Team

 

—–Original Message—–
From: Chris Riggert [mailto:Chris.Riggert@mdc.mo.gov]
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 9:13 AM
To: Volunteer water monitoring
Cc: Paul Calvert; Andrew Branson
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] liability insurance for volunteer programs

Hi all, we did some investigation on this topic in Missouri after one of our
watershed groups asked a similar question. The text below summarizes what
one of my coworkers found (thanks Andrew!):

~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
Chris,

Here’s a response you may want to add to the discussion.

Hope this helps,
Andrew Branson

The state of Missouri has some state statutes that help protect the members of non-profits. Something like this may be available in other states as well.

The first one is:
http://www.moga.mo.gov/statutes/C500-599/5370000117.HTM Officers or members of governing bodies of certain corporations, charities, organizations or clubs immune from personal liability for
official acts, exceptions. They have to be 1) non-compensated; 2) the negligence can’t be gross or willful and 3) what they do has to be covered by the organization’s by-laws.

The second one is:
http://www.moga.mo.gov/statutes/C500-599/5370000118.HTM Volunteers, limited personal liability, certain organizations and government entities, exceptions.

The third one is:
http://www.moga.mo.gov/statutes/C500-599/5370000327.HTM Paddlesport activities–definitions–immunity from liability.

If a group is needing insurance coverage for the participants of an activity that pertains to water, then the American Canoe Association is worth checking into.

The group organizing the event would have to join the American Canoe Association (ACA). $225/year for 100+ members. (Less for fewer members.)

You then qualify for their insurance coverage, but in order to extend it to non-members (i.e., school groups.) you must purchase an “individual event membership” for the activity. This fee is $5/non-member.

Participants may also join the ACA with a $10 Introductory 6 month membership, $30 Individual membership, $40 Family membership or a $25 student membership.

You can find out more about the ACA here: http://www.americancanoe.org

~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^

I can appreciate that these are Missouri statutes, but depending on the
state in which you live, you may have something similar on the books.

Hope this helps!
Chris

Christopher M. Riggert
Stream Team Program
Volunteer Water Quality Monitoring Coordinator
Missouri Department of Conservation
P.O. Box 180
2901 W. Truman Blvd.
Jefferson City, MO 65102-0180
Phone: (573) 522-4115 ext. 3167
Fax: (573) 526-0990
Chris.Riggert@mdc.mo.gov
www.mostreamteam.org

Question 7

Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 08:37:42 -0700
From: “Williams, Gene”
Subject: [volmonitor] Motivating Volunteers Faced with Discouragement

We recently received this email message from one of our lake monitoring volunteers prior to the annual training workshop.

My apologies for waiting so long to reply. My wife and I were debating whether we would be able to do the monitoring this year.

Last year it seemed to be a hit and miss proposition. It is hard to be enthusiastic when it seems to bear so little fruit.

It isn’t difficult to see the waters are in peril. Very few insects in the air, few are fishing and I have seen no fish landed, the beaver are gone, the Osprey don’t visit often, the first mallard hatch has taken cover or died off already, the drakes are bach’ing it on the dock so the ladies must be nesting again, the lily pads below the surface are covered with algae or debris like when they die off in the fall, there are no honey bees and few midges this spring…

What can we do about it? Is it feasible to sample for chemical pollutants washing in from the watershed? Can we get the county to quit killing mosquitoes and every other insect?

We will see you Saturday.

It’s easy to feel his discouragement, and to sympathize with his sense of helplessness.

Unfortunately, the specific concerns he expresses are far beyond our program’s resources to address or monitor. And, he doesn’t even mention the water quality problems we do monitor in his lake, probably because they require restoration measures far beyond available resources to implement.

How do we encourage him that continued monitoring is worthwhile? What small steps could be taken to make a difference? And to help him see that he makes a difference?

This is an issue that faces many volunteers (and programs) after the first few years of initial excitement at being able to monitor a beloved water body.

All ideas are welcome. Thanks.

Gene Williams
Snohomish County Public Works
Surface Water Management
3000 Rockefeller Avenue, M/S 607
Everett, WA 98201-4046
(425) 388-3464 x4563
gene.williams@co.snohomish.wa.us

Responses to Question 7

Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 14:31:38 -0500
From: Jackson.Peter@epamail.epa.gov
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Motivating Volunteers Faced with Discouragement

Just a simple point – I would remind the volunteer that we need water quality data the most when water quality is impaired. The data are needed to document the poor condition. Otherwise, noone knows or cares. Volunteers occasionally need to be reminded that for many volunteer monitoring programs the primary purpose of collecting data is not to”enjoy nature” per se, though we all hope to do so when we are out monitoring. The primary purpose is to document the condition of a waterbody, whether it be for educational or regulatory purposes. The worse the condition of a waterbody, the more valuable the contribution of the volunteer who ventures forth to collect data that documents this poor condition.

Of course, the point of collecting data in most cases is not to “make” a waterbody look good or bad, but to document that condition that is, whatever that may be. My point here is that if someone is concerned
about the poor condition, they should feel comforted knowing their data will show that. Rather than questioning their involvement, they might want to work with their watershed organization, their state water monitoring agency, etc. to raise awareness as to the poor conditions, using their own data as support for their case. It sounds like an opportunity for this volunteer to become an advocate for his/her local water resource. Perhaps they can put their own data to good use. Maybe you can help him/her along with some suggestions, contacts etc.

Of course, as a volunteer, the person will have to have the motivation to continue monitoring, or they will stop. I am just relating how some volunteers I know have found motivation.

Pete Jackson
U.S. EPA Region 5

 

Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 16:15:10 -0400
From: Mayio.Alice@epamail.epa.gov
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Motivating Volunteers Faced with Discouragement

Gene,

The issue you’ve highlighted is an important one and I sympathize with your discouraged volunteer. It can certainly be discouraging to collect data for years and see things just get worse and worse. For one thing, volunteers want to know what’s happening with their data, who’s looking at it, and how it might be used to fix things. Does their data “go” anywhere? Is it reported back to them in a newsletter or in meetings? Is it used to help identify impaired waters of the state? If the state doesn’t use it and the county doesn’t use it, who else can use it?

We often talk about moving volunteers beyond monitoring into taking action. While we need and want monitoring data, we don’t want data just for the sake of data (especially if it ends up gathering dust on a shelf or in a spreadsheet), but rather data that will be used to inform and to effect change. Ideally, government decisionmakers at some level will accept and scrutinize that data and use it to better manage water resources. But if they don’t, individual volunteers and watershed organizations should, and often do, use the data to inform their communities, speak out at planning meetings, write newsletter articles and letters to the editor, present posters at fairs, etc. There are many opportunities for public involvement that can effect change, and a trained, committed volunteer monitor is ideally suited for that kind of involvement.

We do have some resources that can perhaps help. The Summer 2002 issue of The Volunteer Monitor was on volunteer monitoring success stories and should cheer up the discouraged. Another issue of the Volunteer Monitor that is very relevant is the program management issue (spring 1998), which includes articles about the “people” side of volunteer monitoring. Check them out at www.epa.gov/owow/monitoring/volunteer/issues.htm.

Volunteer monitors have made a difference and are making a difference every day, and we don’t want anyone to get discouraged and quit!

Alice Mayio
USEPA (4503T)
1200 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20460
(202) 566-1184

Street Address for visitors/deliveries:
EPA West, Room 7424B
1301 Constitution Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20004

 

Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 22:44:41 -0500
From: mark a kuechenmeister
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Motivating Volunteers Faced with Discouragement

Alice, Mark Kuechenmeister missouri strteam team 888, maline creek. this is the creek that we volunteer monitor for the missouri conservation department. people talk about discouragement and things are not getting better. we have been monitoring this creek for almost 10 years now ( 4 ) times a year . when we do a macroinvertibrate test we do not see alot of good macroinvertibrates in the creek just the tollerant ones. our creek has a poor rating. the state of missouri use our data for a variety of reasons. the creek is an urban creek with most of it impacted by one thing or another. i think what we are doing is not in vain but are letting people know that someone cares about this creek. we also pull out trash , plant trees around the stream banks for erossin control, attend learning seminars, putting arcticles in the local newspapers about what we are doing and helped out with a stream team display at the earthday celebration in st. louis,mo. there are so many things you can do to help out your creek, river, or lake that you should not be discouraged. as nike said just do it. thanks mark k.

Question 8

Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 16:52:52 +0000
From: Robert Ressl
Subject: [volmonitor] Monitoring database

In looking at most of the water quality data collected I note how there is little or no information about the conditions, in the watershed being sampled, that are the causes for the parameters being sampled. Likewise, in most of the sampling programs there is no awareness of the cause and effect relationships that exist in the ecosystem being monitored. Sampling for the purpose of collecting the basic parameters (DO, pH, Conductivity, temperature, etc.) is not bad but it is only a snapshot and doesn’t even detect problems that can exist. The downside is that haveing these measurements tends to give a false sense of conficence that everything is OK and that nothing else needs to be done.

We can’t seem to get past the first step (collecting the simple data) in controlling our actions that impact the environment. We seem to be no further along in the awareness program that just awareness. There are serious problems that our environment is facing and we want to increase awareness. We have to move on and fix the problems. The fixes aren’t cheep and they aren’t easy, and in somecases aren’t possible given our current technology and philosphy.

Responses to Question 8

Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 11:05:08 -0800
From: Eleanor Ely
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Monitoring database
X-Originating-IP: 66.245.36.162
To: Volunteer water monitoring

It sounds as if you had a bad experience. I would say that the attitudes you describe are not at all typical of volunteer monitoring programs. Every monitoring program I know of would agree that monitoring for the sake of monitoring this not useful. If you look through some of the articles in The Volunteer Monitor newsletter (available at www.epa.gov/owow/volunteer/vm_index.html) you will see numerous examples of programs that are paying a great deal of attention not only to finding causes for problems but also to trying to solve those problems.

Eleanor Ely
Editor, The Volunteer Monitor Newsletter
50 Benton Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94112

 

Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 16:52:29 -0500
From: URI Watershed Watch
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Monitoring database
To: Volunteer water monitoring

Robert – you are absolutely correct. And that is why some monitoring programs are creating partnerships with other organizations that may have the info needed to make sense of it all.

For example – some programs are turning to NEMO (Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials) efforts. NEMO typically uses GIS and other assessment tools to evaluate landscapes, in order to help communities to restore degraded areas or reduce impacts from development. Please see
http://www.nemonet.uconn.edu/index.htm for more information about NEMO or to
find a program near you.

By linking monitoring data with the models and other NEMO tools, a more accurate picture of what is happening within a watershed is developed. In addition, NEMO projects typically have technical resources that permit them to create maps and other presentation materials that monitoring programs may not have access to. This allows the monitoring data to be presented in a manner more easily understood by officials and the community – hopefully encouraging them to adopt the best management practices needed to restore or protect watershed resources. Alabama NEMO, NH’s NROC, and RI NEMO programs are examples of NEMO programs that have fully embraced the use volunteer monitoring data.

I’m know there are other examples where organizations have used these concepts to move from data to action, several of which were explored in the monitoring successes issue of The Volunteer Monitor newsletter (http://www.epa.gov/owow/monitoring/volunteer/issues.htm) that was previously mentioned by Ellie Ely.

But if anyone has any suggestions on how we can make that important step of actually using the data locally easier for our programs, please share them!

Elizabeth Herron
URI Watershed Watch
Phone: 401-874-4552
Fax: 401-874-4561
Web: http://www.uri.edu/ce/wq/

Question 9

Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 07:12:39 -0400
From: Joan Martin
Subject: RE:[volmonitor] Moving committed volunteers to the next level – local river protection

We have many great volunteers in our river monitoring program in southeast Michigan and I want to engage some of the more committed ones to encourage their local communities to institute legal measures that will protect the river system from human effects. As an example, the first legal measure that we will probably focus on is restricting activities on the land lying adjacent to the streams.

It is very important to monitor our river system but we do not want to just carefully measure its deterioration. After a few years of monitoring, it is necessary to add an action component.

I am looking for ideas about good ways to implement a program of assisting people to work as advisors with their local elected officials. Please tell me about any sort of similar program that you know about,
either in your own location or elsewhere. Additionally, your ideas and comments on such a program would interest me.

-Joan Martin
Huron River Watershed Council
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Responses to Question 9

Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 05:00:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: David J Wilson
Subject: RE:[volmonitor] Moving committed volunteers to the next level – local
river protection

Hi Joan,

I’ll be able to give a much more authoritative answer to your question after I see how things go with the Woods Creek Friends during the next five years or so! In the meantime, let me do a little crystal ball gazing.

1. I think that the starting point almost has to be the formation of subwatershed groups such as ours and a number of others in the Huron River watershed with which you are familiar. The success and effectiveness of these groups has been/will be greatly aided by HRWC support such as was provided to us by Ric and Dieter. They were perfect. This, unfortunately, does not guarantee a winner; there must be a committed cadre that is willing to learn and whose members work well together. How one arranges this I do not know; sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t. Initially it looked like our group was going to be a disaster, but our “problem children” all dropped out very quickly.

2. We are finding the support of the local government folks to be invaluable. Matt Best and Dan Swallow provide us with expertise on a broad range of essential subjects, they have all sorts of contacts, and they have access to resources that are turning out to be very useful to us.

3. My guess is that we will be most effective in advising local governments after we have established that we know what we’re talking about. That is, after we have successfully carried out a number of data-gathering projects and publicized the results, sponsored a public workshop or two (or more), acquired a reputation for providing accurate information clearly and conservatively, and avoided being used by political and other groups for their own agendas. It would also help to have a large enough membership to provide us with political clout should that be necessary.

4. I love the idea of working on regs to protect riparian buffer strips; that has been on my short list for quite a while.

Best of luck on this.

Dave

 

Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:08:39 -0500
From: Jackson.Peter@epamail.epa.gov
Subject: RE:[volmonitor] Moving committed volunteers to the next level – local
river protection

Joan, your post is a very important one, and I would be very interested
in the response. Also, I do not want to detract from the local focus of
your question, but I would suggest that it might also be of great
interest to ask people how they have used volunteer monitoring data to
encourage their state water monitoring agencies to become more engaged
in local watershed protection, whether through follow-up monitoring or
other actions designed to implement the Clean Water Act. I would leave
it to you to decide if you would like to see a broader response that
incorporates both local and state collaborations.

P.S. – it was very nice meeting you last week!
Pete Jackson
U.S. EPA Region 5 Volunteer Monitoring Coordinator

 

Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:41:22 -0400 (EDT)
From: F5creeks@aol.com
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Moving committed volunteers to the next level – local river …

In much of California, for whatever reasons, volunteer monitoring has generally not been a basis for action. Groups, in my perception, tend to start with a perceived local issue or project. The successful ones build from there. In our area, the San Francisco Bay, serious problems (heavy metals, pyrethroids, etc.) are frequently not amenable to volunteer monitoring.

However, the tests the volunteers can do, and their incidental obsrvations, have often provided a basis for local action. Thus, documenting sewage in streams has led to both repairs and an ordinance requiring inspection and repair of private sewer laterals when buildings are sold. Findings of chloramines (toxic to aquatic life) have led to various action regarding water-main breaks. (I should note that this work has been facilitated by the US EPA Region 9 lab, which has a great program of providing the lab work for properly gathered samples.) And observations and reports of obvious problems — photos and phone calls re stuff flowing down streams or storm drains — have led to appropriate action of various sorts.

All this is by way of saying that yes, monitoring seems a bit empty if it doesn’t lead to action. I am something of a contrarian in this, but I don’t think you need excellent data to do this. You do need to build relationships with local governments by making your reports in a non-accusatory way, following up politely but firmly; and sticking with it, for months or years. Potential weapons to be used include cc’ing regulators at higher levels or elected officials, media publicity, statements at public meetings, posting photos on the internet, ad campaigns, and the like.

I strongly recommend that you NOT start with an issue such as regulating what people can do on their land next to water bodies, unless someone else very powerful has put it on the agenda and you are in a position to influence the outcome. This is an extremely controversial and divisive issue; most volunteers are not in it because they like to fight with their neighbors. Even if everyone has good will, solutions are not easy to work out; rights and wrongs are far from clear.

Your monitoring and other data has probably has given you an idea of what some local problems are — nutrients from what sources? temperature? invasives? erosion? incision? heavy metals? “legacy” pollutants or new threats like pyrethroids? Find some smaller, specific ways to address one of more of those. Small successes, or even small failures from which you learn, will help you go on to larger things.

Susan Schwartz, president
Friends of Five Creeks

 

Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2007 13:08:50 -0500
From: Joan Martin
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Moving committed volunteers to the next level – local river protection

I certainly enjoyed talking to you at our MiCorps conference, Pete. I
got very few responses to this list-serve email and am forwarding them
to you.

Any thoughts about the implications of the silent response?

Thanks,
-Joan

 

Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:43:54 -0700
From: Rich Schrader
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Moving committed volunteers to the next level – local river protection
Dear Pete, Joan, other fellow colleagues,

I am actively using effectiveness monitoring as a way to pull multiple stakeholders, including our state environment department (NMED), into community-based watershed protection. We are also directly linking our work to the No Child Left Inside movement  and the message is beginning to resonate as a high level frame (see the frameworksinstitute.org) that people can understand.

Also you might go to www.riversource.net and look at the data sharing project demo and the Data Sharing web page (pull down from the DATA tab on top). We will develop a project with Opensourcery and the Cimarron Watershed Alliance in the coming year for a watershed health database.

This is just the beginning.

In snowy Santa Fe & thanks for holding the space for the conversation

Rich Schrader

River Source
2300 W. Alameda, A6
Santa Fe, NM 87507
505-660-7928
www.riversource.net

 

Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2007 13:12:03 -0600
From: Jackson.Peter@epamail.epa.gov
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Moving committed volunteers to the next level – local
river protection

Joan, I am sorry that you didn’t get a better response to your important
question – I hope it wasn’t because I might’ve muddied the waters with
my follow-up question! I know one thing, it sure can’t be the question
you asked. Data, once collected, should be put to good use – otherwise,
why collect it? Undoubtedly, local applications will call for different
tactics in different situations; these may include both educating
landowners and local officials to work toward a consensus on water
quality protection, to “legal” measures in some instances such as using
data to draw attention to potential Clean Water Act/water quality
standards violations. Some of the key ideas expressed in your initial
email – adding an “action component” to volunteer monitoring, and
volunteers serving as “advisors” to their local officials – seem like
very important strategies.

I took a quick look at past issues of The Volunteer Monitor to see
whether this issue had been directly addressed. It looks as though
topics somewhat related to your question have been addressed; for
example, community outreach (fall 97, issue 9/2), the Clean Water Act
(spring 01, issue 13/1), and success stories (summer 02, issue 14/2).
Also, some of the issues focusing on partnerships (e.g. winter 03,
winter 04, summer 04). But regardless, it seems clear to me that
getting volunteers to comment on how they have gone about promoting
cleaner water through action using their own data is a very important
question that could use some fresh discussion. There have to be alot of
great ideas out there as to what has been effective and also what has
not worked. We can all learn from both. Let’s hope that some others
will jump in and we can re-start the discussion.

Thanks for raising this issue! Thanks also for passing along the
replies that you have received. And congratulations on all your
successes with the Huron River Watershed!

Talk soon,
Pete Jackson
U.S. EPA Region 5 Volunteer Monitoring Coordinator

Article 1

Silent Streams by Mary Battiata
from The Washington Post November 27, 2005

What follows is the text of an article that is relevant to the volunteer monitoirng world. It was published in the Washington Post on November 27, 2005 and was written by Mary Battiata. Linda Green forwded it to the CSREESVolMon Listserv November 30, 2005.

Silent Streams
Sprawl is threatening almost every stream in the country. But a rising citizens movement is trying to save one of our most important natural resources before it’s too late

It started with Cody the weimaraner. She needed long walks, which led to the creek, which revealed the trash, which led to the decision to clean up the trash, which led to the unearthing of the shopping cart and the migrating lawn chairs, among many other things God never meant to live in a stream. And that, in a roundabout way, is how Dan Radke, a 42-year-old telecommunications salesman and suburban father of two, found himself in ankle-deep water on a Saturday morning in August four years ago surrounded by dead eels. He’d never seen an eel before. Now there were hundreds of them, inert outcroppings of three-foot, green-gray fish strewn in tangled piles up and down the banks, like mounds of melted pipe. Though they didn’t know it yet, Radke and three neighbors had stumbled upon ground zero of what would become known around the neighborhood as the Golf Course Incident.

They had been deputized by Arlington County as citizen stream monitors just a few months earlier. They’d attended a couple of weekend classes to learn how to identify the tiny bugs that use the stream as a nursery.

“It wasn’t what I expected,” said Radke, who takes pains to explain that he is not an environmentalist. “I was a chemistry major in college, but I didn’t know you monitored the health of a stream by counting bugs.” That August morning four years ago, Radke and the others had risen early, collected buckets and nets and rubber boots and headed down to Donaldson Run to conduct their second bug census. They were feeling, if not like old hands, at least modestly confident.

They met near the stream, about a mile up from where it falls into the Potomac, south of Chain Bridge. They unfolded a small field table (a loaner from the county), a microscope (also the county’s), as well as a small TV tray, a white plastic dishpan, some ordinary kitchen ice cube trays and a stack of miniature plastic petri dishes. Then they stepped gingerly down the three-foot bank. They figured they’d net more of the specimens they’d caught the first time out — snails, aquatic worms, leeches and the comma-size larvae, or young, of the biting flies (black, deer and horse) and nonbiting flies (dragon, damsel, crane, caddis) that make up the lowest rung of the food chain for the stream’s fish and birds. They were hoping to see a crayfish, too. The little gray crayfish are the agile acrobats of the stream — frisky, large enough to see without a microscope and so hardy it’s almost impossible to kill them, short of running them over. At the other end of that hardiness spectrum were the so-called sensitive orders — the case-making caddis fly, for example. The presence of this kind of caddis fly would mean the stream’s health was robust.

Instead, as the monitors stepped into the water, they saw that the creek was littered with dead and dying crayfish, their tiny exoskeletons turning from shrimp-gray to white as they stopped taking in oxygen. Then they saw the eels. Eels hadn’t been discussed in the stream classes, but, as the monitors would soon learn, the shy, nocturnal American eel was perhaps the most exotic fish in local waters. Eels spend most of their long lives — from eight to 20 years — patrolling the shallow water under the lips of stream banks, preparing to make one spectacular swim, a journey of a thousand miles, all the way down to the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda. There they breed, and from there their tiny offspring, known as elvers, use one of nature’s most extraordinary, if little understood, homing instincts to return to the streams that their mothers set out from months before. To get home, elvers cross great obstacles, even slithering across short stretches of wet earth and pavement. They are the only fish in local waters that climb Great Falls. Many of the dead eels splayed along Donaldson Run that August morning were the direct descendants of eels that had swum that particular stretch of water in George Washington’s day and before.

Radke hiked upstream along the fence lines of several back yards, and saw that the eel kill extended for more than a block and a half.

“If you’d brought a dump truck out to pick them up, you would have filled it,” he said later. “It was obvious that something had killed everything.”

But what?

“There was no smell, the water was clear,” Radke said. “We didn’t know what to make of it.”

Shaken, and more than a little worried about the stream water on their hands and gloves and sneakers, the Donaldson Run monitors climbed back up the bank and debated what to do. They called the county’s environmental office but got an answering machine. Next, they tried the naturalist who’d trained them, a man named Cliff Fairweather, who told them to call the fire department. Within minutes, firetrucks, helicopters and hazmat vehicles from Arlington and Washington had converged where the creek crosses Military Road in Arlington and flows into National Park land. Hazmat teams followed the trail of dead eels up to the top of a ridgeline and the grounds of the Washington Golf & Country Club.

The mystery was soon solved. The country club was replacing its turf. To kill the old grass, and all of the weed spores in the ground, groundskeepers had been applying a powerful herbicide-fumigant called Basamid G. The instructions for using Basamid G warn that it must not be applied if there is forecast of heavy rain. They also recommend that the product be applied only in a bowl-like setting, where storm-water runoff is not likely.

Memories about the weather forecast for that August day in 2001 differ. County officials recalled that afternoon storms had been predicted. But a club officer later described the ensuing downpour as a “freak thunderstorm.” In any case, when the skies opened, contaminated rainwater washed down the hillside and into Donaldson Run and a neighboring creek and, from there, into the Potomac, a mile downstream.

The fire department quickly cordoned off the stream area with yellow police tape, and the golf club, by all accounts, quickly acknowledged responsibility. Within a few days, all of the government agencies with jurisdiction over streams and fish kills — from Arlington, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service, as well as Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality — were meeting to investigate and to begin what would be a four-year process of assessing damage and considering fines. Down at the creek, meanwhile, the dead eels decomposed. “We sent e-mails out to the neighborhood association — ‘Don’t let your kids and dogs play in the water. Don’t let your dogs eat the fish,'” Radke said. “People started panicking: ‘What about the wildlife that eat it? What about the raccoons?'” But as Radke and the others already knew too well, Basamid G was only the latest in a long series of insults to Donaldson Run. It was a deadly and toxic shock, true, but also part of a much bigger problem with a much less exotic name, one that threatens every suburban and urban stream in the country, and one that would not be solved with yellow police tape.

That problem is pavement, and the way it has changed the ancient relationship between streams and rain. For most of human history, rain fell onto meadows, fields and forests, and sank slowly into the ground. In fact, most of the rain was intercepted by plants and tree leaves before it ever hit ground, and evaporated back into the air, eventually returning as rain again. (This is still the case in undeveloped areas — a forest after heavy rainfall is a remarkably dry place.) The small amount of rain that did reach the ground sank slowly down through layers of soil and rock until it reached the underground water table. From there it flowed laterally and downhill, still underground, toward streams, where it seeped into the streambeds and recharged the waterways from below. During a heavy storm, some rainwater might flow downhill on the ground’s surface, but that was the exception, not the rule.

Pavement has changed all that. Now, every time it rains, water that once would have been slowly absorbed into meadow or forest floor courses off roads and parking lots and roofs and into curb gutters and storm drains, which funnel it directly to the local creek, at a speed and a volume that, before development, a stream saw only during spectacular storms, the kind that occur once or twice a century. These storm-water surges, as they are called, work as giant routers, scouring out streambeds and banks, flushing away the dirt around the roots of trees along the stream banks, and washing away the small creatures that cling to stream rocks. Under this regular, relentless scouring, stream life is swept away, and the stream becomes little more than a biologically dead sluiceway.

Donaldson Run was well on the way to this fate long before the Golf Course Incident. Its banks were badly eroded, as high as 20 feet in places. The streambed had dropped three feet in the past 30 years, exposing sewer lines the county had buried decades earlier. The exposed sewer lines had been encased in concrete sleeves, but those were crumbling, too, under the relentless scouring. The roots of huge bank trees had been exposed, and, every month or two, a few more mighty oaks or poplars toppled into the water, their enormous root balls raised to the air like frazzled nerve endings. The center of the channel was choked with long sandbanks of silt and car-size dams of dead trees, their branches festooned with plastic bags and other litter.

Storm-water runoff now threatens virtually every suburban and urban stream in the country. Stream assessments made by county governments around the Beltway in the past five years have given the majority of local streams a grade of C-minus or less, and there have been plenty of F’s. (Donaldson Run was given a D.) Eighty percent of the 100,000 miles of streams in the Chesapeake Bay watershed are in similarly bad shape, according to local governments and the independent Center for Watershed Protection. Worldwide, streams and rivers are in worse shape than any other habitat, according to University of Maryland stream ecologist Margaret Palmer; the rate of species extinction in streams is five times higher than that of any other habitat and far exceeds that of land or ocean.

In case you are hoping that the problem is of concern only to nature lovers with an inexplicable fondness for miniature crustaceans, think again. A decade’s worth of new scientific research makes it clear that the problem of dying streams has direct and dire implications for the supply of clean drinking water. Streams are now understood to be the vital capillaries of the freshwater system. A healthy stream and the land, or watershed, around it, are a natural and irreplaceable filter for drinking water, a giant Brita. If that function were to be lost, the water that courses into the Potomac from local streams would be far dirtier, full of all the toxins that wash off roadways, things like cadmium and zinc from brake linings, as well as lawn fertilizer and other pollutants. Getting that water to a drinkable standard would be far more expensive than it is now, and would require treating the water with many more chemicals, each with its own cost in money and human health. Water bills in the Washington area already have been increasing for years to compensate for this, according to research by the Center for Watershed Protection.

There is a related danger, as well. In times of drought, streams deprived of the slow seep of underground water that has been absorbed through meadow and forest, slacken or dry up completely, no longer able to support the reservoir and river intakes that supply drinking water. Many policy experts predict that in the coming century, clean water will become as precious a commodity as oil is today, and that water wars, long a feature of the booming cities in the dry American Southwest, will become far more commonplace. Already, legal battles have begun in the Midwest, as far-flung towns with depleted water tables sue for the right to pump water from the Great Lakes. Without healthy streams to feed it, even the mighty Potomac, which supplies virtually all of the drinking water for the Washington area, would be stressed, though local water authorities have highly sophisticated water control systems in place to help prevent shortages of drinking water even during severe drought.

If the connection between streams and drinking water is direct, it is not particularly visible. In many suburban and city neighborhoods, more than half of the streams have been shunted into storm pipes and buried underground. Many people have no idea what stream their downspouts drain into, or the name of the larger stream or river to which their local stream flows. All of that information makes up what stream scientists call a “watershed address.” We all have one. A typical Washington watershed address starts with the nearest stream, then a larger creek — Donaldson Run, for example. Next is Donaldson Run’s destination, the Potomac River. And beyond that, the destination for the Potomac and all Washington area streams, Chesapeake Bay. But the connections are not widely understood, stream advocates say. Most people still believe, wrongly, that litter thrown into the ubiquitous corner storm drain (there are 10,000 of these in Arlington County alone) flows to a water treatment facility, rather than directly into a creek somewhere downstream.

As all of this has become better understood, the nation’s environmental and conservation groups have shifted their focus from the “big water” — oceans and rivers — that occupied them in the 1970s and ’80s, to streams. Washington area county governments also have begun paying closer attention, motivated by looming cleanup deadlines imposed by the regional Chesapeake Bay Agreements and the federal Clean Water Act. (The federal government has set a deadline of 2010 by which ailing Chesapeake Bay must be restored to a certain level of ecological health. If that deadline is not met, the states whose creeks are polluting the water will begin paying large fines.) Under that pressure, Arlington is just one of many counties in the region scrambling to take the measure of its streams — mapping its watersheds, measuring water quality. In the past four years, Arlington and other counties have hired biologists, hydrologists and civil engineers to draw up watershed management plans. Even Fairfax County, long seen by environmental activists and some politicians as indifferent to environmental concerns, has changed its tune, stream advocates say. Fairfax’s recent survey of its streams was unflinching, and it gave more than two-thirds of the county’s streams a rating of fair or poor. “At [county] board meetings now, the question is no longer whether streams matter, but rather, what are we going to do about it,” said Stella Koch, an official with the Audubon Naturalist Society and longtime stream advocate.

At the base of this pyramid of environmental activism is a steadily growing army of citizen volunteers. There are now more than 5,000 watershed- and stream-protection groups around the country, most of which have cropped up in the past decade. Washington has more of these groups than any other metropolitan area. There are 130 groups in this region, from Rock Creek to Hagerstown. Their roots go back to the 1960s, when a federal government worker named Rachel Carson, who lived near the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River, wrote a book called Silent Spring that became a call to arms and a touchstone for the emerging environmentalist movement.

The experience of Dan Radke and others at Donaldson Run is typical of the way the process has worked. Radke, worried about the stream and tired of picking up the trash by himself, first approached the county in the mid-1990s about setting up a stream-monitoring program similar to those he’d heard were underway in Montgomery and other counties. Nice idea, but no money, the county said. But within a few years, the county changed its mind, especially when it became clear that the cost of such a program was minimal.

Donaldson Run is also benefiting from another development in stream rescue, known as stream restoration. This fall, Donaldson Run is being bulldozed, scraped and otherwise altered beyond recognition, as part of a $1.5 million redesign that will raise the streambed, reroute the stream channel and replant its banks with several hundred saplings. It is the most extensive stream restoration ever attempted in Arlington County, and while its impetus was to protect the streambed’s crumbling sewer lines, its goals are more ambitious — to re-create the natural stream features erased by the “fire hose” effect of suburban storm water. (There have been 38,000 stream restorations around the country in the past two decades, with 3,700 of them in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.) “The idea that urban and suburban streams will ever be pristine again isn’t realistic, but, with better management practices, we will be able to get relatively good water quality,” said Mark Bryer, a monitor on a neighboring stream who, in his day job, directs Chesapeake Bay programs for the Nature Conservancy. “A stream like Donaldson Run can go from poor to fair, or fair to good.”

The Donaldson Run Civic Association was sufficiently convinced that it allocated the entire $25,000 of its county-funded capital improvement money to the project. But, like surgery, the process can be hard to watch.

“It is a little shocking,” citizen stream monitor Lucy Spencer admitted, standing by the upper reach of the stream’s main tributary. Bulldozers had carved a new S-shaped course, a giant slalom, into the formerly straight streambed. (The sinews were designed to slow down storm water in the way a twisting luge run can slow down a sled.) About 30 large trees, most of them already severely undermined by erosion, had been razed. The streambed itself had been built up and was now three feet higher than before. New, gently sloping banks were still bare but had been battened down with biodegradable netting, through which new grasses and shrubs would eventually sprout. The work was only partially completed, but already the stream looked radically different — sunnier, sweeter and far more accessible. The weedy ravine it had once resembled was a memory.

At 26 square miles, Arlington is the smallest county in America, but even so, even though the Donaldson Run monitors live within a few blocks of one another, they agree that if they hadn’t decided to take up stream monitoring, most of them might never have met. They certainly wouldn’t have worked alongside one another, gotten to know one another’s foibles and talents, and most certainly wouldn’t have done so at a weekend hour when most people are happy to have done nothing more strenuous than creep out of the house to collect the morning paper.

The group’s monitoring session this July was typical. The songbirds were trilling, and the Asian tiger mosquitoes weren’t too annoying yet, everyone noted with relief. The monitors had gathered early to beat the heat. By 10 a.m., bank stability, water temperature, overhead leaf cover and silt content had been measured and debated, and the consensus entered into the field book.

“Okay, folks,” team leader Anita Marx called out, her head bent over the field book. “Dominant vegetation — what have we got?”

“Well,” said Helen Lane, “I see stilt grass, I see daylilies –”

“We don’t need that detail,” Marx said quickly. A PhD candidate in stream science and not a morning person, Marx was the team leader. It was her job to keep the group from falling into pleasant but distracting, rambling conversations about hummingbird sightings and bridge repair.

“I see weeds, like wineberry,” Lucy Spencer, a sculptor and gardener, volunteered. She raised her head and sniffed.

“I think there’s a dead animal in the woods this morning,” she said to the group. “Can you smell it?”

Marx interrupted again. “Okay, so do we have much in the way of shrubs?” she said, sounding a little pained. With her short hair, cargo shorts, T-shirt and black rubber kayaking shoes, Marx looked at least a decade younger than her 49 years, but she was more bleary-eyed than anyone else on the team. For months she had been working days and staying up until 3 a.m. writing her dissertation. Except for when it was strictly necessary, she generally tried not to interact with the world until after noon. Marx had studied science in college and then drifted into a computer science career but came back to the natural world, and to graduate school, a few years ago. “I decided life was more interesting than computers,” she said.

Marx grew up in Arlington in the 1960s and ’70s, and her subdivision’s creek, she said, “was the only interesting thing in the neighborhood.” Her street drained into Little Pimmit Run. More than half of the stream had already been buried by the ’70s. But the stretch still above ground was full of minnows and tadpoles.

“I think the world would be awfully lonely without other creatures,” she said. “It’s partly because they’re mysterious. They’re something we didn’t create. Cars and computers aren’t mysterious; they’re useful, but not mysterious. But these creatures are.”

And because streams’ utility to us is as yet only partially understood, losing their inhabitants seems like a bad idea. “Life on Earth evolved to be interdependent, and we don’t fully understand those relationships yet,” Marx said. “We don’t really know what we can do without. Each of the pieces has a different function — soil absorbs groundwater, which people drink. Plants produce oxygen, so we can breathe. We eat the fish, which eat much smaller things. So you need the whole web. For me, being out on the creek gives a sense of completion.”

Which is why the Golf Course Incident was so upsetting. “I mean, bottom line: It killed everything,” she said. “We’ve never gotten any crayfish again. All we get these days are the larvae of flying insects, who fly in from other areas and deposit their eggs.”

Once the group had gauged the state of Donaldson Run’s vegetation, Marx dropped tiny tablets into clear vials of creek water to test levels of phosphate and dissolved oxygen, both markers of how much lawn fertilizer had washed into the stream since the previous census. Meanwhile, Radke crouched over the water and kneaded the undersides of softball-size stream cobbles to work loose some insect larvae (which would be returned to the stream later).

Spencer, Lane and another neighbor, Larry Finch, head of the neighborhood civic association, all of them in their seventies, lamented, not for the first time, that their knees and their eyes were not what they once were. “We could use some younger monitors,” Lane observed. “Their eyes are so much keener.”

But what they did have was institutional memory; the long view.

“The water’s flowing fast this morning, really clean,” Finch said.

“Well, we had three inches of rain this week,” said Lane. “That’s a gully washer. Turns the stream into a storm sewer. And every time we get a gully washer, we lose a few trees.”

“We’d love to find a crayfish this morning,” Spencer said wistfully.

“When we moved in, in 1966, we often would see crayfish along the stream,” Finch said. He hasn’t seen crayfish in those numbers for decades.

Radke’s children splashed in the water downstream, near where an artificial reef of gray boulders had been installed three years ago to stem erosion. Instead, the reef, known as riprap and operating like a pinball flipper, simply redirected the water to the opposite bank, where it proceeded to gouge an even deeper divot out of the creek’s flank.

“Ladies,” Marx called out to Spencer and Lane, her head bent over the microscope. “Anybody got anything for me yet?” Having scraped the required number of samplings from under stream rocks, in stream pools and in the ruffled currents known as riffles — the monitors now emptied the nets into a white plastic dishpan filled with two inches of creek water. They began poking around the pan with tweezers, lifting out tiny bits of leaf debris, in search of even smaller larvae. When they found a likely suspect, they sucked it up with an eyedropper and squirted it into a chamber of an empty plastic ice cube tray.

“See that bug?” Radke said to his daughter as they leaned over one of the trays. “They’re swimming. Swim, swim, swim!”

From their plastic ice cube corrals the larvae were transferred once more into miniature plastic petri dishes or directly onto the glass slide under the microscope lens.

“Does a caddis fly mean the water’s good?” Spencer called out as she looked through the scope at a tiny black squiggle.

Marx came over to have a look. “Not that kind of caddis fly,” she said. Then she squinted again. “What we have here is a mayfly,” she announced. The insect was duly noted on the day’s count sheet. The work went on.

Four years after their first meeting, most of the monitors have a hard time remembering where they saw the recruiting notice that brought them here. Spencer thinks it was a local newsletter. Marx, an Audubon Naturalist Society bulletin. But all of them can remember precisely what impelled them to venture out to that first meeting.

Spencer, a Tennessee native who has been in Arlington for 31 years, minus stints in Peru and the Middle East during her husband’s State Department career, had been a gardener and led her daughters’ Camp Fire Girl groups.

“I said, Okay, in 10 years I am going to be 80. So what are these next 10 years going to be about?” The streams of Middle Tennessee had been a big part of her childhood. Back then, before the paper companies began clearcutting the local forests and overwhelming the streams with runoff from eroded hillsides, her family had spent Sundays by the water. “The water was so clear, my grandfather used to throw coins in, and we’d swim around trying to find them.” As an adult stationed in the Middle East, she’d seen how frightening it could be when clean water was scarce.

“This stream has connected me to this place in a way I’d never been connected before,” she said. “I’m not a committee person, but now I feel I’m really part of a community. I come here almost every day now. I’ve done a lot of things in my life, but this is the thing I’ve stuck with the longest.”

Dan Radke’s romance with local streams started in the early 1980s, soon after he moved to Washington from Pittsburgh after college. He and some friends rented a group house near Spout Run, and from there Radke began to explore the local network of stream valley parks. He found a job, and then acquired a puppy, Cody. She expanded his hiking range considerably. They went out for long walks twice a day, eventually hiking all of the streams, or runs, that course down to the Potomac from North Arlington’s rocky palisades. (The word “run” comes from the Old English “rundle,” which means a stream that runs down over a gently sloping bed lined with smooth rock, or cobbles.) Around the time he got married, Radke moved closer to Donaldson Run and began to notice the trash. It was hard to miss. Each rainstorm swept new piles of paper, plastic and other debris into the creek, where the trash snagged on branches and otherwise did not go away. He began bringing trash bags along on his hikes and filling them, but soon had too much trash to carry out by himself. He called the county, which referred him to an overworked Parks and Recreation person. “But we agreed that if I collected the trash, they would come and pick it up.”

As connected to the stream as he had become, Radke couldn’t help but notice the other problems — the erosion, the toppled trees. When he first brought that to the county’s attention, in the mid-1990s, the response was tepid. There was no money and no one on staff who was responsible for stream health. But in 1999, the county’s environmental department hired a young environmental scientist named Jason Papacosma to assess the health of Arlington’s streams. Within a few months, Radke and Papacosma had met with Cliff Fairweather, a stream specialist at the Audubon Naturalist Society, to talk about putting together Arlington’s first stream-monitoring program. Fairweather had been instrumental in setting up several citizen monitoring groups in the D.C. area and in instructing group leaders, including county officials such as Aileen Winquist, an Arlington environmental planner who has gone on to manage many monitoring teams and their data. (The state Soil and Water Conservation District office in Northern Virginia and the conservation group Save Our Streams also have trained stream monitors.) Ask many stream-monitoring groups in the area about their early days, and, often as not, Fairweather’s name will come up.

It is not unusual for one person to be so influential, said Maryland stream ecologist Margaret Palmer, who has examined stream restoration projects across the country.

“Sometimes it can be traced to one person who has been incredibly active,” Palmer said. “Sometimes it just takes one person.”

It was spring and a fine day for bug hunting. Cliff Fairweather was walking down a narrow, grassy path toward a small jewel of a stream called Margaret’s Branch, just outside the town of Clifton in southwestern Fairfax County. In 15 years with the Audubon Naturalist Society, Fairweather has taught hundreds of stream monitors how to identify a healthy stream. Mild-mannered, with eyeglasses that keep sliding down his nose, he has the distracted mien of a professor of the open air, a detective appraising the earth through field glasses. Fairweather is an interpretive naturalist, which means he is a kind of translator who makes the mysteries of the natural world readily understandable to non-specialists. He refers to his insect specimens as “pickled bugs” and in the field frequently interrupts himself to point out anything interesting. “Tiger swallowtail!” he called out, pointing to a yellow flash of butterfly wings. “Ruby-crowned kinglet over there,” he added a moment later, pointing to a grove of trees and mimicking the bird’s call.

“There’s been a kingfisher real active around here the last few days,” he said, making his way toward the creek, his worn canvas hiking boots making squishing sounds in the marshy ground. “We’ve got some red-shouldered hawks . . . those birds you hear now are white-footed sparrows and some junkoes, I think. And the Louisiana waterthrush — confusing name, it’s actually a warbler — has arrived from down South. They use the stream, too.”

Fairweather came to his present calling after more than a decade working for a defense contractor, doing historical research on the atmospheric nuclear testing program. “Took me 15 years to find out what I wanted to do in life,” he said cheerfully. But he’d always been an ardent amateur naturalist. Growing up in Alexandria in the 1960s and ’70s, he’d spent hours each week down at the local stream. It was always the first place his mother sent for him when he couldn’t be found.

Fairweather’s classes are free and open to all comers, and Margaret’s Branch is his outdoor classroom. With its banks shaded by tall tulip poplars, Margaret’s Branch looks like a picture postcard mailed from the 18th century. Its streambed is no wider than two feet in most places and is cosseted by shallow banks tufted with grasses and flowering weeds. It meanders through a 20-acre nature sanctuary, a former working farm donated to the Audubon Naturalist Society, one of the oldest conservation groups in the D.C. area and the nation.

“Most people get into this without any background in ecology, and it opens up a whole new world to them,” Fairweather said, setting his buckets and other teaching gear down with a clank, beside the stream. “I’ve seen workshops where people are getting their first exposure, and in minutes they are really hooked. A lot of it is the appeal of the stream creatures. They are beautiful. And they have some adaptations for survival that really captivate people.”

He crouched over the water. The case-making caddis fly fascinates, Fairweather said, lowering his net, because it alone among all the aquatic insects uses small bits of gravel, sand, bark to build an intricate stone wall around its lower body. Under a field microscope, the wall appeared to be made of multicolored “bricks,” like the form-stone facade of a Baltimore rowhouse.

In addition to becoming familiar with the basics of stream biology — the life cycles of benthic macroinvertebrates, or stream bugs — stream monitors also, inevitably, learn about geology, engineering, hydrology and other fields that make up the science of how streams behave.

“When you start getting a lot of storm water, and it starts cutting into the creek, the channels change to accommodate,” Fairweather said. Unstable banks collapse and take shade trees with them. The stream’s course widens and straightens. The water heats up. Storm surges race through, leaving behind a layer of silt that suffocates all the stream creatures that haven’t been washed away.

“There are all kinds of creeks in Alexandria like that. Cabin John Creek in Maryland is becoming like that. We had to abandon one monitoring site up there because there were no bugs to see.”

Even in Washington’s outer suburbs, where smaller amounts of pavement might seem to leave streams less stressed, the damage by storm-water runoff is accumulating. A short walk from Margaret’s Branch, the banks of Popes Head Creek show clear signs of stress, even though they are surrounded by green fields and horses cantering along a trail on the opposite bank. The problem is that the creek’s headwaters, five miles north, are surrounded by suburban sprawl. The stream runs through many subdivisions before it gets to Clifton. It is 15 to 20 feet wider than it was 100 years ago, and the streambed has dropped several feet.

Scientists and watershed planners refer to the amount of paved ground in a watershed as its “impervious” rating. The skyscraper canyons of Rosslyn, for example, have an impervious rating of 60 to 70 percent, while in the rest of Arlington, an older inner suburb, it is about 40 percent. The neighborhoods immediately around Donaldson Run are about 25 percent impervious. One paved acre of land throws off 16 times more water than a one-acre meadow does.

Once the impervious rating in a watershed climbs much over 10 to 15 percent, the stream that drains it begins to wash away. When the impervious rating is 55 percent, the variety of stream creatures drops by 90 percent, and sensitive species disappear entirely.

Historically, stream health has not figured in local government decisions about development. But that is changing. This year, for example, the Potomac Watershed Roundtable, a new coalition of Northern Virginia watershed planners led by Fairfax County Supervisor Penny Gross, sent the state legislature a proposal to give local governments the power to pass tree conservation ordinances. Such ordinances would establish a link, for the first time, between the storm-water management fees paid by housing developers and the number of trees they preserve. (Incentives like that would have helped western Fairfax County’s severely degraded Little Rocky Run, where citizens spent a long weekend planting 300 trees along the creek only to learn that elsewhere in their watershed, at the very same time, a developer had clearcut 10,000, an entire forest.) But the very vocal dismay and ongoing activism of the Friends of Little Rocky Run and the group’s founder Ned Foster have been an important goad, local officials said, an incentive to get things right. In fact, prodded by a combination of new science, citizen awareness and federal and state clean water laws, local governments are slowly realizing that a healthy stream can be as valuable a real estate asset as good schools or adequate roads, said Diane Hoffman, head of the state’s influential Soil and Water Conservation District office in Northern Virginia. Stream science is now so solid and irrefutable, and the understanding of it so widespread, that even the decades’ old logjam among environmentalists, local governments and development interests is beginning to break loose.

“It’s not just the Chesapeake Bay anymore,” said Fairweather. “People want their local stream to be decent. That’s a big shift from 10 years ago. Back then, streams were just kind of there, and there wasn’t this focus on ecology. The question now is: Would you rather have a healthy stream running through the neighborhood, or a storm-water ditch that the kids can’t play in and your dog gets sick if it licks it?”

“We’re in the early heart-transplant era of stream restoration,” said Tom Schueler of the Center for Watershed Protection. “It’s still as much an art as a science. We have a lot of technology, but not all of the patients survive.”

The blueprint for the Donaldson Run project was three years in the making, and its many pages unfurl to cover the table in a meeting room. Its planners have high hopes for it, but evaluating its success will be subjective because there is, as yet, no objective scientific standard by which to evaluate the effectiveness of stream restoration projects. To that end, an international team of scientists, led by the University of Maryland’s Margaret Palmer and known collectively as the National River Restoration Science Synthesis Project, is working to develop just such a tool.

But there is one local stream restoration project that appears to have been a success. It is Kingstowne, named after a nearby townhouse development in the Alexandria portion of Fairfax County. There, a 1,000-foot stretch of badly damaged stream, a tributary of Dogue Creek, has been raised from the nearly dead. The project was funded by county, state and federal agencies and two citizen groups as a test case five years ago. Today, the creek’s newly contoured banks sway with grasses, and minnows and water bugs dart through the sparkling water. But only half of the stream’s course was reconstructed. The other half continues to deteriorate.

The price for saving a creek in this way is not cheap. Stream restoration can cost from $200 to $600 a linear foot. The cost of restoring Fairfax’s badly eroded Little Hunting Creek, for example, is estimated at $35 million, and “that’s not to get it back to some beautiful pristine waterway,” said Fairweather. “That’s just to make it reasonably healthy and clean.”

Because of the cost, restoration may not be an option for many ailing streams in America, stream ecologists agree. So ecologists and watershed planners are pushing something called “low-impact design,” a variety of systems to catch storm water before it gets to the corner storm drain. These systems include everything from planting “green roofs” of rain-thirsty vegetation, which captures rain-water and insulates the building below, to attaching rain barrels to downspouts and conserving water for lawn and garden use. In Fairfax County, local planners are working with state conservationists to retrofit the 55-acre former Lorton federal prison complex — soon to be an arts center — with the latest in storm-water containment technologies. Some are surprisingly low-tech, like simply cutting up massive parking lots into smaller islands of asphalt that allow for wedges of absorbent green space in between. All of these are improvements on the often weed-choked, now discredited “storm-water management ponds” that were installed in countless subdivisions, shopping centers and office parks during the 1970s and ’80s.

In the end, however, storm-water containment systems can only do so m

require realistic planning to leave enough absorbent green space between the ever-expanding acres of pavement.

The Chesapeake Bay watershed has enough pavement to park 116 million cars. Many local streams already are severely stressed by storm-water runoff, and the watershed’s human population is expected to grow by 4 million in the next 25 years. “We’re improving our game all the time,” Schueler said, “but we can’t keep up with sprawl.”

Early this month, Donaldson Run was a royal mess, as planned. The project was one-third completed. The stream was being dammed in 200-foot sections, the water in between sucked out and pumped downstream to make way for backhoe operators and bulldozer drivers, who maneuvered their equipment in surprisingly balletic pirouettes, scooping dirt from one area of the streambed and patting it into place elsewhere. Staircases of U-shaped stone waterfalls intended to slow the flow were laid at intervals into the streambed, which had been raised several feet and was now within spitting distance of the banks and surrounding flood plain.

Meanwhile, four years of negotiations among the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Washington Golf & Country Club about compensation for the eel kill and other damages were nearing completion. A draft of the settlement was published in the Federal Register last month and was expected to be finalized in federal court soon. In the settlement, the club agrees to pay $145,000 for damages, including “substantial mortality of fish and American eels and virtual elimination of smaller aquatic organisms immediately downstream” from the herbicide’s release.

Bob Mortenson, a past president of the club, said it was a moment of chagrin for the oldest golf and country club in Virginia, one whose fairways have hosted everyone from President Woodrow Wilson to the White House surgeon of Theo-dore Roosevelt. The groundskeeper, who has since retired, “didn’t sleep for weeks afterward,” Mortenson said. “When you’re a groundskeeper, you’re responsible for growing stuff. You want to make sure it stays alive.”

The Donaldson Run monitors carried out their quarterly census, as planned, last month. They set up shop well downstream of the restoration. They didn’t find too much — some aquatic worms, a caddis fly, some black flies. There was no sign of eels. They wouldn’t be out in the daytime anyway. But they are never far from anyone’s mind. It is hoped they will repopulate, because the upper half of the stream was untouched by Basamid spill.

Nothing out of the ordinary on the zoological front, they reported. But the stream was another matter entirely. Seeing so many of the big old trees along the stream banks gone — about 110 have been razed — had been a bit of a wrench. For as long as anyone could remember, a walk along Donaldson Run had been an amble in dappled shade. Now, it was a walk in the bright sunlight. And it would be that way for several years, at least, until the fastest-growing saplings, now protected by deer fence, have had a chance to grow up.

Spencer was out walking the other day up by the mouth of the pipe where the stream’s main tributary emerges from the ground, not far from its natural spring. The ground was corrugated with bulldozer tire tracks, and straw had been sprinkled around to clot the mud. An orange plastic construction fence had been put up to keep the curious out of harm’s way. But Spencer had let herself in a few times to have a look around. That’s how she happened to see the frog. She’s pretty sure it was a frog, and not a toad. It was sitting near the lip of the storm pipe, which had been plugged by a temporary rock dam and was almost dry.

“I’ve been walking this stream for 31 years, and I’ve never seen a frog. I’ve asked around — nobody’s ever seen a frog,” Spencer said. She still sounded elated several weeks after the sighting. “This means the water is pure enough that a frog could live here.”

Even though she knew she shouldn’t interfere, she couldn’t help herself that day. She went over to the dam and lifted one small stone, to let a trickle of water through.

“I just hope the pumps didn’t suck the frog up,” she said, doubtfully. Then she brightened.

“But you see, that’s why this is so fine — all of this,” she said, throwing her hand, in a wave that took in the whole scene — the debris and the dirt, the bulldozers and jagged tree stumps. “All of this will be worth it,” she said. “We’ll make it worth it. A real stream is a wonderful thing.”

Mary Battiata is a Magazine staff writer.

Question 10

Date: Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 12:59 PM
Subject: [volmonitor] Return of monitoring equipment

Our Ohio monitoring program has a problem that has probably plagued most programs at some time. How do you get volunteers to return equipment? Our program is statewide and training is done through regional sessions. We provide kits at these meetings to anyone that expresses interest, a sizable fraction of whom never use the kits.

Our “kit” is now running as high as $80+ dollars and we need them back. We have talked about charging for the kit, requiring a refundable deposit, and begging them to return them. We don’t have the staff to later visit each non-participating volunteer individually and put our hand out for the equipment. There’s got to be a better way.

I would appreciate any suggestions that have worked for you.

 

Responses to Question 10

Date: Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 1:22 PM
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Return of monitoring equipment

Hi,

This is indeed an issue we have. We have actually implemented some steps to not actually provide equipment until individuals jump through a few cursory hoops in addition to the training we provide.

However, for those that have the equipment we took a multi-step approach.

1) Use a “media blitz” to inform folks about wanting unused equipment. We took the approach of dollars and cents and that these pieces of equipment could be returned and refurbished and provided to volunteers wanting to use it…saving the Program a substantial amount of money.

2) We took a more direct approach by looking at the database to see who has been trained vs. who has submitted data. If we noticed individuals haven’t turned in data for 2-3 years we contacted them and took the approach of seeing why. A lot of times, they had all intentions, just felt overwhelmed and hadn’t gone out yet. This provided us a great opportunity to remotivate them. However, if they let us know they no longer wanted to, or were not able to monitor, we worked on getting the equipment returned.

3) We encouraged the return of equipment to happen in a couple ways:
a. Drop off equipment at any of our training sessions, meetings, etc.

b. Drop off equipment at any of the sponsoring agencies’ Regional or Satellite offices.

i. This required coordination with these offices that the equipment being returned was not hazardous material and should be returned to Program staff at our offices.

ii. It also required individuals label the equipment as “Returned Stream Team Equipment; Return to [INSERT STAFF MEMBER]”

c. Volunteers could contact us and we would send them a pre-paid mailer. They could then simply pack everything up into a box, put the sticker on it, and send it back to us by U.S. Mail. This is something that our mailroom already had set up, making it pretty easy to take advantage of.

We have been pretty successful in being able to get equipment returned, refurbished, and loaned to volunteers that are able to go out and collect data.

Hope this helps!!

 

Date: Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 1:26 PM
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Return of monitoring equipment

Hi,

Thinking back to when I was a volunteer program coordinator….

1) Have the volunteers come and pick up the rental equipment, that way you know they are serious or they wouldn’t come in to get the stuff. Maybe bringing the equipment to them is making it too easy for them – everyone loves a “handout”, and even with the best of intentions they often wind up not making it a priority. (It sounded like fun at the time…) With my old program, many of our volunteers picked up their gear. We would try and accommodate them when they had attended the trainings, adopted one or more sites, etc. but always after the training. Followup was required on their part prior to the equipment loanout, so we knew they were serious by that point. I think handing out equipment at the training is the fatal flaw here.

2) Loan the equipment out for a finite period, e.g. two weeks. Make it clear to them that you need it back to loan out to other volunteers. (If you were desperate you could even add a small late charge for equipment that is say over a week late.)

3) You could set a policy where they would be required to pay $80 for the kit if not returned by the end of field season.

I recommend all of the above.

 

Date: Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 1:57 PM
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Return of monitoring equipment

Folks,

Here in California, when I was working for the State, we created an equipment lending library and tracked each Instrument separately.
As many of you know, the Clean Water Team had a unique Instrument ID for each probe and wet-chemistry kit and a master Equipment Inventory spreadsheet that listed all of the Instruments we owned. When a watershed group (or an individual volunteer) needed to borrow anything, they had to fill out a Lending Form with their name, contact information, the unique Instrument IDs of what they took, and the duration of use. Then they signed the form, and we updated our spreadsheet with the whereabouts of each Instrument.
Recovery was usually successful, unless the Instrument was damaged or lost.

I hope this sounds useful.

PS: The unique instrument ID is also the basis for the Data Quality Management (DQM) system that allows our groups to deliver data of known and documented quality. It provides the easiest way to connect a set of monitoring results with the outcomes of quality checks done for the Instrument that was used to collect those results. (Much) more at
http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/swamp/cwt_toolbox.shtml

always look forward with hope

 

Date: Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 2:01 PM
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Return of monitoring equipment

I’d like to know if anyone from a state or federal program has been able
to charge a “late fee.” I would like to do so but I don’t have a way to
manage the money.

 

Date: Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 3:34 PM
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Return of monitoring equipment

Like all volunteer monitoring groups, we have this problem from time to time. Our kits cost upward of $500 and it is a drag when we lose one and the number of samplers in our statewide program is small (around 125 sites).

If, at the end of the season I don’t have a volunteer’s samples, I’ll contact them and see what the deal is. Since I circle the state (Missouri) at least 2 or 3 times a season, it’s not a problem for me to arrange to pick up the supplies. I’ve also used University Extension offices, state agency offices, county park offices, resorts, marinas, senior centers, etc. as drop off sites for equipment and water samples. I’ll call and arrange things first with the business owner/office manager, but they usually are amenable to the notion. Then I just pick up the stuff later and don’t have to be too specific about the time of day.

You might have another volunteer near the “delinquent” water sampler. Heck, they might even know each other. The current volunteer could bring you the delinquent volunteer’s stuff at their convenience.

It’s all pretty labor-intensive stuff, though. Easily justified for $500, considerably less so for $80.

 

Date: Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 9:26 PM
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Return of monitoring equipment

I am a volunteer for the Missouri Stream Team.  I do not have any plans to give back monitoring equipment they gave me to the Mo. stream Team program. I plan to keep on monitoring the creek I monitor till I die. Have a great day see you in the stream.

PS: I’ve been monitoring the creek for over 15 years.

 

Date: Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 8:14 AM
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Return of monitoring equipment

We lose some every year too, usually folks who sign up, go thru training and then never monitor.

At the start of the season we have volunteers sign a log sheet and check off each piece of equipment they get. At the end of the season they fill out a similar sheet, checking off what they have returned. This has helped considerably, and we know who to try to track down, tho I admit we are not so good at follow-thru. If someone who is not a volunteer wants to borrow monitoring supplies for another project, such as a science fair project, I have a parent give me a check (not made out to me) for at least twice the value of what I am lending out. I tell the parent that I will hold the check until the equipment has been returned. That has worked 100%. On occasion someone cleans out their garage and returns long-ago equipment. We have also had drop offs at Town Halls, watershed organization HQ’s etc.

Our worst failure was a HS science teacher to whom we supplied 4 kits, each worth >$200. We never heard from him again, ever. We tried to contact him multiple times. We even tried calling the HS principal, no luck, tho we heard the students loved using the equipment. Years later his by-then ex-wife became a volunteer. Once we found out that she was an ”ex” we told her what had happened. She was not surprised and said he’d retired.

Good luck!

 

 

Categories
Listserv

Road Salt Monitoring

Question 1: Does anyone have any information on road salt accumulation, etc.?

Question 2: I would love some feedback on starting a road salt monitoring program.

Question 1

From: Tony Williams
To: Volunteer water monitoring
Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2005 1:58 PM
Subject: [volmonitor] road salt accumulation

Does anyone have any information on road salt accumulation, road salt runoff to lakes, rivers, estuaries, or other concerns with road salt?
Or a link to a web page on this concern.

Tony Williams
Water Monitoring Coordinator
The Coalition for Buzzards Bay
Nashawena Mills – 620 Belleville Avenue
New Bedford, Massachusetts 02745
Tel. 508-999-6363 x.203
Fax. 508-984-7913
www.savebuzzardsbay.org

Responses to Question 1

(Editor’s note: Not all responses are compiled here; some were lost before being posted…)

Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 17:45:30 -0500
From: Jeff Schloss
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] road salt accumulation

Tony-
Not knowing your specifics I have listed some suggestions for starting below:

I have a host of circa 1970, 1980 and early 1990 references on road salt impacts that I can fax you if you need. The one seminal paper is by Robert Bubeck et al. (note: Lucky for you Bob was one of my graduate advisors):
Runoff of Deicing Salt: Effect on Irondequoit Bay, Rochester, New York (in Reports) Robert C. Bubeck; William H. Diment; Bruce L. Deck; Alton L. Baldwin; Stewart D. LiptonScience, New Series, Vol. 172, No. 3988. (Jun. 11, 1971), pp. 1128-1132.

This was one of the first to suggest that accumulated salts in bottom waters could prevent mixing of lakes.

It seems Science had an article on road salt each issue for a while -one of local interest may be:
Release of Mercury from Contaminated Freshwater Sediments by the Runoff of Road Deicing Salt
G. Feick; R. A. Horne; D. Yeaple
Science Vol. 175, No. 4026 (Mar., 1972), pp. 1142-1143

Also closer to home for you (in Mass.) I know Normandeau Associates in NH did a “Generic Environmental Impact Report” on road salt accumulation in February 1992 for the Massachusetts Department of Public Works Snow and Ice Control Program. I only have the draft report of this document but I expect you have better connections.

Also Mark Mattson and others at UMass did a very nice GIS analysis showing water quality impacts to streams nearest to highway networks if you were looking for cause/effect studies. It is available on the JAWA web site.

I also know there has been some funded work by USGS Water Resources Research Centers on salt impact to inverts:
http://water.usgs.gov/wrri/02-03grants_new/2003MD30B.html

In terms of salt alternatives there has been a lot of work up in Alaska on using acetate compounds but they found a pretty high BOD resulted. See Lake and Reservoir Management Vol 5 (2):
Effects of Calcium Magnesium Acetate Deicer on Small Ponds in Interior Alaska
Jacqueline D. LaPerriere and Caryn L. Rea
pp. 49-57

I would also follow-up on Elizabeth’ recommendations for even more current references.

-Jeff

 

Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 12:02:45 -0500
From: Marie-Françoise Walk
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] road salt accumulation

Hi Tony,
A late reply in case nobody mentioned this person to you: At the COLAP meeting this past January, Douglas Heath, of USEPA Region 1 in Boston gave this talk and knows a lot about road salt pollution in the region: ROAD SALT IMPACT TO LAKES, STREAMS AND GROUNDWATER from Interstate 93 and Adjacent Roads in Southern New Hampshire —

Marie-Françoise Walk

Question 2

Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:39:09 -0800 (PST)
From: Kelly Stettner
Subject: [volmonitor] Sodium chloride sampling?
To: Volunteer water monitoring

Good morning. I would like to start a modest program to monitor for road salt at a location where a brook meets the Black River. I would love some feedback if you have any experience with this!
Caveats or warnings? Inexpensive equipment? Best practices & procedures? Testing done yourselves or by a lab? Any other advice?
Many thanks,
Kelly Stettner

Black River Action Team (BRAT)
45 Coolidge Road
Springfield, VT 05156
http://www.blackriveractionteam.org

Responses to Question 2

From: Stepenuck, Kris
Date: Friday, November 13, 2009, 12:27 PM

Kelly

You might be able to use simple conductivity meters such as the Oakton EC Testr.

Kris

 

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 12:08 PM, Kelly Stettner wrote:

Thanks, Kris! I’m right there with you, that a conductivity test would be a great first-stage indicator as to whether further testing is warranted. I’ll check around to see who carries the one you mention ~ have you used that one yourself or know anyone who has? I’d love to know if it has any quirks or particularly helpful features!
Much appreciated,
Kelly

 

From: Stepenuck, Kris
Date: Monday, November 16, 2009, 5:00 PM

Kelly

Yes, we have used it with some on-farm monitoring, rusty crayfish monitoring and in marshes. I like it, though we haven’t put them to tough tough use. They can be easily calibrated with a solution I was able to buy in small packets, but they come factory calibrated too, which is nice. Batteries do run out esp. if left sitting for a long time.

Kris

 

Update 2015: See here for Wisconsin’s volunteer road salt monitoring program: http://watermonitoring.uwex.edu/level3/UrbanRoadSalt.html

Categories
Listserv

Transparency Monitoring

Question 1: I would like to know how people make their own secchi disks.

Question 2: I am wondering about the pros and cons of using a one liter container to collect transparency tube samples.

Question 1

I am interested in hearing from people who make their own Secchi disks. I would like to know how you make them. Thank you!

Ellie
Eleanor Ely
Editor, The Volunteer Monitor Newsletter
50 Benton Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94112

Responses to Question 1

Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 10:35:39 -0500
From: Elizabeth Herron
Subject: [volmonitor] Re: Secchi, transparency tube photos & info

Hello:

In response to Ellie’s inquiry regarding making Secchi disks, I would like to offer this link to our website for our “Measuring Water Clarity” factsheet. Among other things, this pdf document includes instructions for making your own disk, as well as a primer on basic water clarity.

http://www.uri.edu/ce/wq/ww/Publications/Secchi.pdf

Then of course, the definative site for measuring water clarity is the “Great North American Secchi Dipin” found online.

Thanks

Elizabeth Herron

Question 2

Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:23:24 -0500
From: Anne Lewis <annelewis@sd-discovery.com
Subject: [volmonitor] t-tube sample size

Hello,

I am in the process of putting together a loaner kit for teachers who want
to try volunteer monitoring. I expect most of the borrowers to be upper
elementary/middle school teachers. The kit will include 60cm. transparency tubes. In looking at the different SOPs out there in volunteer monitoring land, I notice that the recommendation for collecting the sample is to use a large bucket.

Since the volume of a 60cm tube is a little less than a liter, I am
wondering about the pros and cons of using a one liter container to
collect the sample. The benefit would be a greater chance for a
homogenized sample; the drawback – a risk of spilling and sloshing so the
sample size is "short".

Thoughts?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Anne Lewis
Information and Education Project Administrator
Project WET South Dakota
SD Leopold Education Project

SD Discovery Center
805 W. Sioux Ave.
Pierre, SD 57501
605-224-8295
605-224-2865 (fax)

Responses to Question 2

Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:57:46 -0500
From: Erik Olson
Subject: RE: [CSREESVolMon] Fwd: [volmonitor] t-tube sample size

Boozhoo,

Two things of comment.

1. We noticed during our river surveys in Northern Wisconsin that in some cases the 120 cm transparency tubes were even to short. And on every stream we sampled the 60 cm was way to short. With that being said we were working in Northern Wisconsin were watersheds are still covered with more “undisturbed” surfaces. So it depends on the stream or river, but I would recommend having a couple 120 cm tubes on hand.

2. It seemed pretty easy for us to just fill up the tubes in the river/stream instead of transferring water in a bottle then to the tube. I prefer filling the tube directly up in the stream if possible over filling a bottle and then filling the tube. Although, it would definitely be an option in the stream was too shallow or too dangerous to wade into, or if your crew wanted to keep their feet relatively dry. And I suppose if you fill directly from the stream you run the risk of getting large objects, i. e. leaves, into your sample.

Erik Olson
Natural Resource Specialist
Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College

Categories
Listserv

Service Provider Network

Question

Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 13:18:12 -0500
From: Danielle Donkersloot
Subject: [volmonitor] Service Provider Network:

Hi Everyone:

I would like to know how many states have a volunteer monitoring service provider network? I am familiar with C-SAW in PA but I am looking for other examples.

My definition of a Service Provider Network is an existing mechanism that provides technical assistance and quality control to groups throughout the state consisting of professional staff of watershed associations, agencies, environmental organizations. This work/hand holding is done on a case-by-case basis for a fee.

Let me know if you have been involved in something similar or if you know of a group I can contact. Thanks again for you help!

“In order to achieve something, you must get started” Fortune Cookie wisdom
Danielle Donkersloot
609-633-9241 (direct line)
609-633-1458 (fax)
PO Box 418
Trenton, NJ 08625
http://www.nj.gov/dep/watershedmgt/volunteer_monitoring.htm

Responses

Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 14:32:03 -0500
From: Peggy Savage
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Service Provider Network:

Hi Danielle,
When I was in MA, Charles River Watershed Association (CRWA) got a grant from EOEA (Executive Office of Environmental Affairs) along with 4-5 other groups to create a Service Provider Network. We were given specific geographic areas to cover – where we were to be the “first line of defense” for any requests for help from groups within our area. As the Network went along, we eventually created a list of skills that each of us could provide — and then if one of us got a request for assistance on a topic we didn’t specialize in, we could direct them to someone else. The Service Provider Network only lasted as long as the funding did (2-3 years). It took a while to get it up and functioning, since no one was aware of what monitoring groups existed where. But I would say that the majority of requests came from groups who were unaware that the Network existed.

I will dig around in my files at home and send you another contact of one of the other Service Providers who basically was already doing it for groups in their area. He may be able to give you more info — or let you know if it has been reinstated since I left.

Hope this helps! Take care — Peggy

 

Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 13:38:58 -0700
From: Rich Schrader
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Service Provider Network:

Danielle,

My company in many ways is providing a network like you describe for New Mexico. There are many monitoring service providers, but very few who work with volunteers. Go to riversource.net to see some of the projects River Souce has using an informal network of contractors.

Also, I’m on the board of the Rocky Mountain Watershed Network, a regional network for service providers.

Rich Schrader

 

Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 16:14:13 -0500
From: Geoff Dates
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Service Provider Network:

Yes! It’s a great small-scale (but growing) model that grew out of a school program. I’ve recommended Rich to groups and tribes in NM and have been impressed with his adaptations of our training materials and the creation of his own approach to linking data to local planning, and even place-based stream restoration projects.

Geoff

 

Date: Mon, 03 Apr 2006 10:35:07 -0400
From: stacey@vasos.org
Subject: [volmonitor]

We are starting something similar in Virginia. We are just in the beginning stages of development. We have based some of our organization on what’s going on in other state’s. We have some information about other states’ programs on our website.

Stacey Brown
Virginia Save Our Streams
P.O. Box 8297
Richmond, VA 23226
804-615-5036
stacey@vasos.org

 

Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 14:09:59 -0500
From: Geoff Dates
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Service Provider Network:

Hi there,

Try these for starters.
Angie Becker Kudelka in MN (Minnesota Waters – was the Rivers Council of MN)
Eric Mendelman of Texas Watch
Missouri Stream Teams
IoWater
MA Water Watch Partnership (Jerry Shoen)

Your definition casts a broad net, especially with agency-run lakes programs. I think most states have something that looks like what you describe.

Have a great weekend. I’m off to Wyoming next week. Anyone in Jackson I can give your regards?

Geoff

 

From: HANSON Steve
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Service Provider Network:

I’m not sure if my program fits in. I am a state funded, no charge to
monitoring groups, program. More info at
http://www.deq.state.or.us/lab/wqm/volmonitoring.htm

 

Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 12:08:54 -0800
From: Bridget Hoover
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Service Provider Network:

Hi Danielle, I guess you would say that I provide a roll of “Service Provider” within the boundaries of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. We have a listserv, I loan equipment and can provide training to do water quality monitoring for smaller groups. We also have a QAPP that can act as an umbrella for smaller organizations, however, that has only been done once. We also try to standardize protocols and data management between groups. The Network has been in existence since about 1998. My website is below for more info or you can call me if you want to discuss further. Bridget

Bridget Hoover
Monterey Bay Sanctuary Citizen Watershed Monitoring Network Coordinator
299 Foam Street
Monterey, CA 93940
B (831) 883-9303
F (831) 883-4748
www.montereybay.noaa.gov/monitoringnetwork/welcome.html

Categories
Listserv

Spanish Materials

Question 1: Does anyone know of a source for an aquatic macroinvertebrate key that’s written in Spanish?

Question 2: Does anyone have volunteer monitoring manuals and/or other educational materials in Spanish on their websites?

Question 1

Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2006 00:11:12 -0600
From: Kris Stepenuck
Subject: [volmonitor] Spanish macroinvertebrate key?

Hi
Does anyone know of a source for an aquatic macroinvertebrate key that’s written in Spanish?

Thanks.

Kris

Kris Stepenuck
WI Volunteer Stream Monitoring Coordinator and staff on Volunteer Water Monitoring National Facilitation Project
UW-Extension and WI Department of Natural Resources
210 Hiram Smith Hall
1545 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1289
Phone: 608-265-3887
Fax: 608-262-2031
http://clean-water.uwex.edu/wav
http://www.usawaterquality.org/volunteer

Responses to Question 1

From: Zevin.Paula@epamail.epa.gov
Subject: Fw: [volmonitor] Spanish macroinvertebrate key?
To: kris.stepenuck@ces.uwex.edu

Hi Kris,

I’ve sent an e-mail to our office in San Juan, PR. I’m hoping that they will get back to me soon with helpful information.

Paula Zevin
Regional Volunteer Monitoring Coordinator
Division of Environmental Science and Assessment
U.S.E.P.A. – Region 2
2890 Woodbridge Avenue, MS-220
Edison, NJ 08837
Tel.: (732) 321-4456
Fax: (732) 321-6616
zevin.paula@epa.gov

 

From: Sherry Forgash
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Spanish macroinvertebrate key?
To: Volunteer water monitoring

Hi,
try the University of Puerto Rico, They are one of the land grant universities in EPA region 2.
hope this helps

Sherry Forgash
Nassau County SWCD (Soil and Water Conservation District)
1864 Muttontown Rd.
Syosset, New York 11791
516-364-5860 Phone
516-364-5861 Fax

 

From: Mayio.Alice@epamail.epa.gov
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Spanish macroinvertebrate key?
To: Volunteer water monitoring
Cc: Kim Leizinger

Kris, have you contacted the folks at Global Water Watch (affiliated with AL Water Watch)? gww@auburn.edu
I belive they conduct monitoring training sessions in Central America.

Alice Mayio
USEPA (4503T)
1200 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20460
(202) 566-1184

 

From: Chris Sullivan
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Spanish macroinvertebrate key?
To: kris.stepenuck@ces.uwex.edu

Hi Kris,

I have a document from Georgia Adopt-A-Stream that details chemical and biological monitoring. There is not a key, but there is some picture guides, unfortunately, now that I look at them, they are in english. the rest of the document is in Spanish and may prove helpful.

If you do find a key in Spanish, can you send it to me?

I have attached the Georgia doc to this email.

peace
Chris

 

Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 08:07:58 -0600
From: William Deutsch
Subject: Re: [CSREESVolMon] Spanish macroinvertebrate key?
To: Kris Stepenuck
Cc: Omar Romagnoli ,

Kris,
We will soon be translating our stream bioassessment manual into Spanish in preparation for some workshops in Mexico in March. This may not include a full key, but will have the principles and practice of biomonitoring, based on a modified, EPA protocol 1 (three groups of macroinvertebrates and a biotic index of WQ).

Bill

 

From: Lisa Galloway Evrard
Subject: RE: [CSREESVolMon] Spanish macroinvertebrate key?
To: ‘Kris Stepenuck’

Kris,

I’m not aware of any Spanish keys, but the “Get Bugged About Water Quality” keychain/magnifier are available in Spanish (www.epa.gov/waterscience/biocriteria).

Lisa

Lisa Galloway Evrard
Program Associate, Water Resources
Rutgers Cook College
Rutgers Cooperative Research & Extension
14 College Farm Road
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551
732-932-2739
Fax: 732-932-8644
email: evrard@rci.rutgers.edu

 

Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 08:01:50 -0700
From: Andree Walker
Subject: RE: [CSREESVolMon] Spanish macroinvertebrate key?

The EPA used to have small magnifying glasses attached to cards with
pictures of macros on them. They had Spanish versions. Maybe they have a
Spanish key?
Andree’

 

From: “Seago, Jan”
Subject: RE: [CSREESVolMon] Spanish macroinvertebrate key?
To: Kris Stepenuck

Kris,

I asked Sharon Collman, our favorite ‘bug lady’ and she says that EPA has a handout available that is English and Spanish. It is not a complete list, however. If you call your EPA regional office’s PERC they might have some. If you do not have access to that number, call Region 10 at 206-553-1200 and ask for Ms. Hayslip.

Jan Seago
WSU Extension
Water Resource Education Program Coordinator
509.248.6869 office
360.951.5536 cell
seagoj@wsu.edu

 

From: Will Payne
Subject: RE: [CSREESVolMon] Spanish macroinvertebrate key?
To: ‘Kris Stepenuck’

Kris,
I don’t think you will find word-for-word translations for “common names”. However, the Latin taxonomy is universal! Anyway, I’ll keep checking. In the meantime, here are some Spanish translation manuals from Georgia adopt-a-stream that you may find useful
http://www.georgiaadoptastream.org/db/local_coord.asp

Will Payne
Yuma Agricultural Center
The University of Arizona
6425 W. 8th St.
Yuma, AZ 85364
(928) 782 – 3836

 

Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 14:38:06 -0500
From: Linda Green
Subject: RE: [CSREESVolMon] Spanish macroinvertebrate key?

List serve folks, here is info on Spanish macroinvertebrate keys, forwarded from Manuel L. Pescador, to Dave Penrose, then to Greg Jennings and finally to Kris S & list serve participants.
Gracias!
——————-
Hi Dave:
The two publications that come to mind which have keys in Spanish are:
1. Roldan, G. 1988. Guia para el estudio de los macroinvertebrados del Departamento de Antioquia, Colombia. Fen-Colombia, Colciencias,
Universidad de Antioqua, eds. Santafe de Bogota, Colombia 217p.

2. Fernando, F., C. M. Gonzalo Andrade, and G. Amat. 2004. Insectos der Colombia. Vol. 3. Universidad Nacional de Colombia. 602 p. Both references have keys to families in Spanish. The paper by Roldan includes all the macroinverteberates while Fernando et al. paper ideals with insects both aquatic and terrestrial. I am sure there are other references on macroiinvertebrates in Latin America that I am not aware of, I will be on the look out and keep you posted. Our book on Mayflies of South America which will be published by Pensoft Publishers in Spring 2006 has keys(Families, Genera, Species) in both English and Spanish. I just finished reviewing the galley proof and we are looking forward to see copies of the book coming out soon.
Let me know if I could be of further assistance.
Hasta pronto,

Manny

 

On 12 Jan 2006 at 9:06, Dave Penrose wrote:
Hey Manny,

Hope things are going good amigo.

I got this message today asking for bug keys in Spanish and I’m assuming
that they want something fairly general. Can you help with this? Thanks.

Saludos,


Dave Penrose
Water Quality Extension Associate
NCSU Water Quality Group
Campus Box 7637
Raleigh, NC 27695-7637
ph: 919-515-8244; fax: 919-515-7448
email: dave_penrose@ncsu.edu
www.ncsu.edu/waterquality/

“Entomologists are the most gentle people on earth – until a taxonomic problem crops up; it then transforms them into tigers.” Vladimir Nabokov, 1971

 

From: Kristen Travers [mailto:ktravers@stroudcenter.org]
Sent: Friday, January 13, 2006 3:56 PM
To: Volunteer water monitoring
Cc: Kim Leizinger
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Spanish macroinvertebrate key?

Another reference for the list –

Hernandex, HR and Dominguez, E. (eds). 2001. Guia para la Determinacion  de
los Arthopodes Bentonicos Sudamericanos. Universidad Nacional de Tucuman,
Tucuman, Argentina.


Kristen Travers
Stroud Water Research Center
970 Spencer Road
Avondale, PA 19311
610-268-2153 x239

 

Also see page 24 of the Winter 2005 edition of the Volunteer Monitor newsletter for a listing of Spanish lanugage water-quality focused educational materials: http://www.epa.gov/owow/monitoring/volunteer/newsletter/volmon17no1.pdf

 

Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 10:28:46 -0400
From: Linda Green
Subject: [volmonitor] FW: Spanish/English water and environment Extension
factsheets
FYI –

The weblink below provides a link to Extension publications available in
Spanish and English on water and environmental issues:

Shortcut to: http://extensionenespanol.net/

Linda Green

 

Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 17:22:36 +0000
From: Giovany Guevara Cardona
Subject: Spanish macroinvertebrate key?

Dear Kris

I am writing to you because of I see your message in Internet. I have a
caddisfly larvae key from Antioquia (Colombia) and other documents.

I hope that this information can be useful for you.

Trichoptera Coello GGC-2005.pdf (4.8 MB pdf file)

Plecoptera.pdf (221 KB pdf file)

zoologia2.pdf (548 KB pdf file)

Regards!


Giovany Guevara Cardona
Biólogo-M.Sc. Est. de Doctorado en Ciencias, Mención Sistemática y Ecología
Instituto de Zoología
Facultad de Ciencias
Universidad Austral de Chile
Casilla 567
Campus Isla Teja
Valdivia-Chile

 

Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 17:37:09 -0400
From: “Rozum, Mary Ann”
Subject: Spanish/English water and environment Extension factsheets

The weblink below provides a link to Extension publications available in
Spanish and English on water and environmental issues:

http://extensionenespanol.net/

Question 2

Date: Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 3:22 PM
From: Mayio, Alice
Subject: [volmonitor] monitoring manuals/educational materials in Spanish?

Does anyone have volunteer monitoring manuals and/or other educational materials in Spanish on their websites?  Global Water Watch has some Spanish content on their website but I’m unable to find actual manuals or instructional materials in Spanish.  I’m interested in helping support an environmental education project in Chile.  Thanks!

Alice Mayio
USEPA Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds
1200 Pennsylvania Ave NW (4503T)
Washington, DC  20460
(202) 566-1184

Responses to Question 2

From: Tara Muenz
Date: Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 3:36 PM
Subject: RE:[volmonitor] monitoring manuals/educational materials in Spanish?

Hi Alice,

Yes, you can find 3 of our Georgia Adopt-A-Stream manuals translated here (scroll towards the bottom): http://georgiaadoptastream.org/db/manuals.asp

Very Best,
Tara

Tara Muenz
State Coordinator, Georgia Adopt-A-Stream
Environmental Protection Division, GA DNR
4220 International Parkway, Suite 101
Atlanta, Georgia 30354
PH: 404-675-1635
FAX: 404-675-6245
Tara.Muenz@gaepd.org
www.GeorgiaAdoptAStream.org
Find us on Facebook!

 

From: Christina Medved
Date: Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 9:04 AM
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] monitoring manuals/educational materials in Spanish?

Alice,

We have a Spanish version of the Leaf Pack Experiment manual available as a free download on the Leaf Pack Network® website: http://www.stroudcenter.org/lpn/resources/manual/
We also have a  macroinvertebrate identification key, sorting sheets and a few other macro resources in Spanish. We developed them for workshops we taught in both Costa Rica and Peru. Those resources can be found here: http://www.stroudcenter.org/research/projects/MooreFdnPeru/training.shtm

All the best,
Christina

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Christina Medved,  M.A.
Education Programs Manager/Leaf Pack  Network® Administrator
Stroud Water Research Center
970 Spencer  Rd., Avondale, PA 19311
(610) 268-2153 ext. 301,  FAX: (610) 268-0490
http://www.stroudcenter.org/  or https://www.facebook.com/StroudCenter

 

From: Lorien Walsh
Date: Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 11:57 AM
Subject: RE:[volmonitor] monitoring manuals/educational materials in Spanish?

There are some lesson plans on monitoring/watersheds that were developed for WWMC by Project WET a few years back.  They are available in Spanish at http://www.monitorwater.org/Intl_Spanish_Lesson_Plans.aspx.

 

From: Stepenuck, Kris [mailto:kfstepenuck@wisc.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, May 08, 2013 1:56 PM
To: Volunteer water monitoring

Although we don’t have manuals in both languages, we have English as well as Spanish-dubbed stream monitoring training videos at: http://watermonitoring.uwex.edu/wav/monitoring/video.html

And also our key to life in the river is in Spanish: http://watermonitoring.uwex.edu/pdf/level1/riverkey-SP.jpg and in English: http://watermonitoring.uwex.edu/pdf/level1/riverkey.pdf

The Give Water a Hand Guide (produced by UW-Extension but not part of our stream monitoring program) is in both languages too: http://www.uwex.edu/erc/gwah/

Kris Stepenuck

Kristine Stepenuck
Water Action Volunteers Stream Monitoring Program Coordinator
UW-Extension and WI Department of Natural Resources
445 Henry Mall, Rm 202
Madison WI 53706
608-265-3887 (MTF)
608-264-8948 (WR)
608-575-2413 (mobile)
kfstepenuck@wisc.edu

 

 From: Julie Wood
Date: Wed, May 15, 2013 at 5:13 PM

Thanks Kris!
Super useful.

Julie Wood
Senior Scientist
Charles River Watershed Association
190 Park Road
Weston, MA  02943
t 781.788.0007 x225
f 781.788.0057

Categories
Listserv

River Clean Ups

Question

Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:30:16 -0800 (PST)
From: jenni kempf

Greetings:

Although this question is not monitoring specific, I thought I would ask all of you River Experts about purchasing bulk trash bags for River Clean-Ups.

We go through about 1200 per year and are shopping around for the best deal on bags. We would prefer to buy bags with recycled content, but in the research I have done so far, the bags with recycled content seem to be thinner than the industry standard.

Does anyone have a recommendation?

jenni kempf
Friends of the Fox River
Crystal Lake, IL

Responses

Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:43:05 -0800 (PST)
From: Kelly Stettner

Try linking your event with a larger one, like American Rivers’ National River Cleanup Week. I found that my watershed council has an annual cleanup event for which they have trash bags printed; both of these options supply me with free bags and a terrific network of support.
Or try asking around some local “clean” businesses to see if they have anything you can use; I found a soy candle company that stored their waste wax in large, heavy-duty trash bags. When they had emptied 50 or so, I went and picked them up. The bonus was that our smelly river trash adopted a lovely fragrance!
Cheers,
Kelly Stettner

Black River Action Team (BRAT)
45 Coolidge Road
Springfield, VT 05156

 

Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 07:14:10 -0600
From: Chris Riggert

Hi Jenni, I can’t send an attachment to the ListServe, but if you contact me, I can forward you the list of companies we have used for the Missouri Stream Team’s Stash Your Trash Program. Most of the bags we get are a mesh bag for floaters to use while enjoying our Missouri streams. However, we also have a larger version for stream clean ups, as well as a 3 ml plastic bag large enough to use in a 55 gallon trash can. I can tell you since we are a state agency, the suppliers are based in Missouri (all are out of St. Louis, I believe).
We get a pretty good price on these, but most of this is because of the quantities we get every year. For example, we provide over 300,000 of the red mesh bags…mostly to the businesses in the floating industry. But the larger mesh bag, and poly bags go to our volunteers while conducting their stream clean ups.
Thanks!
Chris
Christopher M. Riggert
Stream Team Program
Volunteer Water Quality Monitoring Coordinator
Missouri Department of Conservation
P.O. Box 180
2901 W. Truman Blvd.
Jefferson City, MO 65102-0180
Phone: (573) 522-4115 ext. 3167
Fax: (573) 526-0990
Chris.Riggert@mdc.mo.gov
www.mostreamteam.org

 

Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:10:37 -0800
From: Erick Burres

Jenni,
One of the groups out here in Southern California stopped using single
use bags for their clean ups. They use recycled content bags. The
collected trash is put into a dumpster and the bag is reused.
Save Our Beach
PO Box 1014
Seal Beach, CA 90740
Phone 562 884-6764
Fax (877) 222-6345
kim@saveourbeach.org

You can also try: http://www.wecarebags.com
Janet Price, Account Executive – Sales
(213) 300-8001 Direct
WE CARE Media
Division of EZ Products International LLC *California ??? Arizona ???
Arkansas ??? Florida**
866.578.0682 Phone and fax
Sincerely,
Erick Burres
Citizen Monitoring Coordinator
SWRCB-SWAMP-Clean Water Team

Categories
Listserv

Apps

Discussion 1: Creek Watch App Updates

Discussion 2: How do programs go about sending text reminders to volunteers?

Discussion 3: Does anyone have knowledge of scanning field forms and using IT tools to align the information in the database?

Discussion 4: Are any volunteer monitoring programs using electronic field forms or mobile applications in any way?

Discussion 5: We’re hoping to learn more about the tools/technologies currently being used for citizen science as well as features people would like to see.

Discussion 6: Does any monitoring group have a stream walk data app?

Discussion 7: We are looking for low-cost, reliable sampling methods to increase amount of streams sampled.  Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Discussion 1

From: Erick Burres (eburres@waterboards.ca.gov)Date: Mar 21, 2012

CREEK WATCH APP UPDATES- New Version Available and More…

The new version of Creek Watch is now available!!!

Creek Watch now integrates with Facebook and Twitter to help get the word out about water quality in our waterways! Full details here: http://www.ibm.com/creekwatch. A video detailing the new features can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tOkdIKm1Nc

Over 4,000 users in over 25 countries are using the Creek Watch app. Creek Watch makes collaborating easy. Collaborative efforts can learn about creek seasonality, discover nuisance flows, pin point trash hot spots and more. Learn how the City of San Jose is using the app and how IBM volunteers participated in a Snapshot Day monitoring event.
www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/water_management/article/creek_watch.html

If you’d like to join the conversation on Facebook, you can share the announcement from ibm research: http://www.facebook.com/IBMResearch. You can also tweet or re-weet about Creek Watch on twitter- our hashtag is #creekwatch.

A guest blog on Creek Watch written by SWAMP’s Clean Water Team Coordinator, Erick Burres, can be found at http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2012/03/creek-watch-iphone-app-goes-social.html.

Free Creek Watch downloads: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/creek-watch/id398420434

———————————————————————————–
Erick Burres
Citizen Monitoring Coordinator
SWRCB-SWAMP-Clean Water Team
eburres@waterboards.ca.gov

Desk (213) 576-6788
Cell (213) 712-6862
Fax (213) 576-6686

Clean Water Team c/o LARWQCB
320 W 4th Street
Suite200
Los Angeles, CA 90013

Responses to Discussion 1

From: Alice Mayio (Mayio.Alice@epamail.epa.gov)
Date: Mar 21, 2012

Erick, can you clarify how the photos and judgements about flow and trash are used? It seems like the data are sent to a central location/database where they can be accessed by agencies or anyone else. Who maintains the database? Do data sent in by someone in Kansas or Mexico go to the same database? It seems also as though people in Kansas or Mexico might be thinking their photo and data are valuable, when in fact no agency in Kansas or Mexico is looking at the database and reacting to the information in it (as an example).

I can see the value locally if your local agency (or vm group) regularly checks the database and sees a big spike in trash at a certain location and therefore directs a cleanup action there, or if the agency consults the flow information before sending crews out to conduct biological assessments, as in the San Jose example.

I ask because we have frequently discussed internally whether an app that allows a simple assessment of habitat or other indicators of stream or lake health would be valuable…the biggest hurdles would seem to be managing the information that comes in, ensuring the data are useful, and ensuring that the data are used. And managing the expectations of the people who use the app.

Thanks for sharing this info on the Creek Watch app!

Alice Mayio
USEPA Office of Water
Phone: 202-566-1184, Fax: 202-566-1437
Mail: 1200 Pennsylvania Ave NW (4503T), Washington, DC 20460
Delivery: 1301 Constitution Ave NW (Rm7330Q), Washington, DC 20004

From: Kara Rockett (kara@plumascounty.org)
Date: MMar 21, 2012

On another note- I think it would be helpful if a person could note if the creek is dirty for other reasons besides just trash (ie. sediment, algae bloom, oil, etc). I don’t know if someone can pass that on to the creators of the app.
-Kara

Discussion 2

From: Julie Wood [mailto:jwood@crwa.org]
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2012 3:47 PM

I noted that at the NWQMC some presenters mentioned sending out text alerts and reminder to their volunteer, if you do this, how do you do it? Do you use your personal cell phones and text packages to send them out? Are there websites or programs that allow you to send mass texts not via your personal cell?

Thanks,

Julie Dyer Wood
Senior Scientist
Charles River Watershed Association
190 Park Road
Weston, MA 02493
Phone: (781) 788-0007 ext. 225
Fax: (781) 788-0057

Responses to Discussion 2

From: Donkersloot, Danielle (Danielle.Donkersloot@dep.state.nj.us)
Date: May 29, 2012

Yes. It is “edmodo”, a website program that we used to communicate that way

Discussion 3

From: Melanie Trost (Melanie.Trost@matsugov.us)
Date: Jun 19, 2012

Hello!

I’ve just become aware that there are programs which can be used to scan field forms, mapping the handwritten data directly into the appropriate places in a database.

Eliminating the time-consuming task of manually entering data would free us up a bit more to accomplish other exciting and wonderful things for our volunteer lake monitoring program, if this technology really is a good fit for us. Our data is stored in Excel, though we are open to other possibilities if there is a better program to use.

If you use this sort of software or have any thoughts or information on the subject, please share!

Thanks much,

Melanie Trost
Watershed Coordinator
Matanuska Susitna Borough
Planning Department
Environmental Division
350 E. Dahlia Avenue
Palmer, Alaska 99645-6488
Phone: (907)745-9608
Cell: (907)354-1293
Fax: (907)745-9876
mtrost@matsugov.us
www.matsugov.us/lakemonitoring

Responses to Discussion 3

From: Revital Katznelson (revitalk@sbcglobal.net)
Date: Jun 19, 2012

I talked to Phil Kaufmann (EPA Corvallis) about this a few years ago: The EPA’s Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) has a system for physical habitat assessments data in which rigidly-structured field data sheets are filled by operators who are applying their best penmanship skills… Back in the office, the data sheets are aligned (using their coded frame) and scanned by an OCR machine. The information is read directly into a set of data files; these are fed directly into a SAS software program that calculates the desired Endpoints (metrics, descriptive statistics, percentiles, indices, etc.).
It costs an arm and three legs, it is extremely rigid, but it worked very well for EMAP.

There are a number of Excel templates with drop-down menus for direct data entry in the field, using a PDA or a field computer. I have developed and used them for water quality measurements and physical habitat assessments. And we are getting ready for tablets: my mobile-device Excel guru Stephen Bye told me in January 2012 that he is working on an Excel program for android tablets, but it will be a while before it is ready. The program will support Excel features such as drop-down menus that are needed for field data-entry.

The water quality measurements template for the PDA is available on the California Clean Water Team toolbox, at
http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/swamp/cwt_toolbox.shtml

I hope this information is helpful,
Revital
===================

Revital Katznelson, Ph.D.
Environmental Scientist
Berkeley, California
revitalk@sbcglobal.net
510 406 8514

Discussion 4

From: Mayio.Alice@epamail.epa.gov
Date: Nov 1, 2012

Informal survey: are any volunteer monitoring programs using electronic field forms and smart phones/tablets/iPads etc to note field observations and sampling data and send it directly to a central database? are you using mobile applications in any other way?

I’m aware of the California Creek Watch app but not much else. I know we have periodically had this conversation on the listserve, but times are moving quickly.

EPA is looking into possible options for supporting volunteer monitors in the field using mobile technology, and it would help to know if anyone is already doing this (or is working on it, or thinks it would be helpful!). Any comments (yea or nay) welcome!

Alice Mayio
USEPA Office of Water
Phone: 202-566-1184, Fax: 202-566-1437
Mail: 1200 Pennsylvania Ave NW (4503T), Washington, DC 20460
Delivery: 1301 Constitution Ave NW (Rm7330Q), Washington, DC 20004

Responses to Discussion 4

From: Danelle Haake (danelle.haake@gmail.com)
Date: Nov 1, 2012

There are a couple of volunteers with the Missouri Stream Team Program who are working on apps. One is starting out with an android app to submit ‘activity reports’ (rather than the WQM data), but is leaving the design open to allow future expansion to data submission. The other I believe is working on an I-phone app… Both of these are volunteer-led development efforts rather than efforts funded by the program, so I would say they are driven by demand. At least some of the volunteers want this.

Danelle Haake

From: Clement, Dennis (Dennis.Clement@epa.state.oh.us)
Date: Nov 2, 2012

Steve Kerlin at Northern Kentucky University (NKU) is in the process of creating an app for the IPhone called River of the Web. Not sure that the website is completed or when the app will be available at the Apple Store. The website is http://row.nku.edu/.

From: Meghan Ruta (mruta@hvatoday.org)
Date: Nov 2, 2012

The organization I work for hasn’t really made much use of it since our staff doesn’t have IPhones, but I know that IBM worked to develop an app a little while back. I had looked into it for a project and it appears fairly simplistic, basically a quick and easy way for the average person to be able to get involved by documenting a stream they pass by normally. Along with taking a photo the user submits visual observations related to water level, flow rate, and trash. Since the photo is automatically geotagged when it is submitted it is included in the app’s database and the map on the IBM site. http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/water_management/article/creek_watch.html

Meghan Ruta
Water Protection Director
Housatonic Valley Association
PO Box 28, Cornwall Bridge, CT 06754
Tel (860) 672-6678
Fax (860) 672-0162
www.hvatoday.org

 

From: Nancy Mueller (nysfolanancy@verizon.net)
Date: Nov 2, 2012

In New York, we have an older volunteer population. We would be happy if they would all read e-mail! While we have discussed developing on-line field data entry capability, we know that only about 75% of our volunteers would use it. Even if we do have on-line entry available, we would probably still want to have hardcopies of the field data. It’s easier to spot errors (ft vs m) (degrees F vs degrees C)–cross outs, etc.

Our iMAP invasive team has developed an APP, and we hope that many of our volunteers will be trained to use it. However, we are not yet comfortable with the computer literacy of our volunteers to rely solely on electronic means of communication.

Nancy J. Mueller, Manager
NYS Federation of Lake Associations, Inc.
P.O. Box 84
LaFayette, NY 13084
(800)796-3652
fola@nysfola.org

From: ecovrar (ecovrar@gmail.com)
Date: Nov 2, 2012

Can’t remember if it was mentioned on this list or somewhere else, but there’s EpiCollect. It was originally developed by Imperial College London to collect field data for epidemiological research (hence the name), but it is generic enough to be used for environmental data.

http://www.epicollect.net/

EpiCollect.net provides a web application for the generation of forms and freely hosted project websites (using Google’s AppEngine) for many kinds of mobile data collection projects.
Data can be collected using multiple mobile phones running either the Android Operating system or the iPhone (using the EpiCollect mobile app) and all data can be synchronised from the phones and viewed centrally (using Google Maps) via the Project website or directly on the phones.

What could I use it for?
Anything you wish to collect data for: eg wildlife or plant surveys, questionnaires, locations of favourite places, keep a record of where you’ve been etc.. It is also being used for epidemiological studies e.g. mapping cases of disease in Africa.

How much is it?
EpiCollect is a completely free and open source project.
—-

May save you from having to reinvent the wheel.

-David

From: Melanie Trost (Melanie.Trost@matsugov.us)
Date: Nov 2, 2012

Our program would be very interested in moving toward electronic data recording in the field. Like some of the other programs, several of our volunteers are not likely to either have their own smart phone or to have the desire to attempt reading/typing information into one.

Currently, our volunteers complete the field form by hand – Four pages of Secchi, observational data, lake profile data then we manually enter the information into Excel. Finding a way around this time consuming process would be priceless! We entertained the idea of working with field forms that would have the fields on the form ‘mapped’ so upon scanning, the data would automatically populate the database. EQuIS LakeWatch www.earthsoft.com/products/equis-lakewatch/ does this and apparently can also be programmed to automatically update data displayed on a website. It’s not cheap, but with the time savings, it’s hard not to entertain the idea.

However, the ability to enter data digitally in the field would eliminate the need for an expensive program (and how much trouble would it be if you ever need to make changes to your mapped field form?), BUT – I do have reservations about not having a hard copy and the ability to double-check the data.

At the NWQM Conference in April, I visited a few vendors whose lake profiling equipment is set up to send data to a digital display (laptop or smart phone), or to a standard handheld display like what we use (and data is handwritten on a hardcopy form). Just switching to the laptop setup could certainly be a timesaver but would also mean switching over to new equipment…

I will stay tuned to hear what is out there and what is on the horizon!

Melanie Trost
Watershed Coordinator
Matanuska Susitna Borough
Planning Department
Environmental Division
350 E. Dahlia Avenue
Palmer, Alaska 99645-6488
Phone: (907)745-9608
Cell: (907)354-1293
Fax: (907)745-9876
mtrost@matsugov.us
www.matsugov.us/lakemonitoring

From: Diana Muller
Date: Nov 2, 2012

Good Afternoon,
My experience with water quality apps has been extremely positive, people that use them LOVE them. Our Waterkeeper oranization in Ontario had an app developed for bacteria monitoring, it is now nationwide and I use it for my South RIVERKEEPER, South River, Maryland summer bacteria monitoring program. We found that our volunteers and members love this app and want us to expand it. So I am looking into expanding it for all of my othe water quality parameters and misc items.
http://theswimguide.org/

Cheers,
Diana

Captn. Diana Muller, South RIVERKEEPER
South River Federation
2830 Solomons Island Rd., Suite A
Edgewater, MD 21037

From: Corse, Kristi (kristi.corse@h-gac.com)
Date: Nov 5, 2012

The Texas Stream Team has an iphone app.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/texas-stream-team/id441789617

I have an android phone, so I haven’t used it. You can contact one of the folks over at the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment for more information:

http://txstreamteam.meadowscenter.txstate.edu/about-us/staff.html

Regards,

Kristi

Kristi Corse Alexander
Public Outreach & Volunteer Coordinator
Houston-Galveston Area Council
3555 Timmons Lane, Ste 120 Houston, TX 77027
P.O Box 22777, Houston, TX 77227-2777
direct: 832-681-2564 | main: 713-627-3200 | fax: 713-993-4503
www.h-gac.com

From: Jason Frenzel (jfrenzel@hrwc.org)
Date: Nov 5, 2012

We’ve been looking into options, but haven’t found the right thing. Have been collecting best practices from a number of existing platforms and plan to submit an application to our local Google team for potential development. My thought, also, would be an open platform so other organizations could edit the fields and drop downs as needed for their use. I’d be happy to discuss further.

Best, ~Jason

Jason Frenzel, CVA
Adopt-A-Stream & Stewardship Coordinator
Huron River Watershed Council
734.769.5123 x600

From: Anne Lewis [mailto:annelewis@sd-discovery.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 10:55 AM

As far as I can tell the resources below require a data plan and smartphone.

Does anyone know of any data collection tool that utilizes texting capability?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Anne Lewis
SD Discovery Center
805 W Sioux Ave.
Pierre, SD 57501
605-224-8295
http://www.sd-discovery.org/

Stepenuck, Kris

Nov 20

Mike Feinen with USGS in Middleton WI has a text tool he’s developed for having citizens upload staff gage height readings. Here’s a link to an abstract about that project: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2012AM/webprogrampreliminary/Paper211230.html and a presentation he gave at NWQMC: http://acwi.gov/monitoring/webinars/social.water.pdf

Kris Stepenuck

Kristine Stepenuck
Water Action Volunteers Stream Monitoring Program Coordinator
445 Henry Mall, Rm 202
Madison WI 53706
608-265-3887 (MTF)
608-264-8948 (WR)
608-575-2413 (mobile)

From: Kimberly Cressman (Kimberly.Cressman@dmr.ms.gov)
Date: Nov 20, 2012

There is a group that uses text messaging to keep track of water level at staff gages. The homepage is http://crowdhydrology.org

They did a webinar a few months ago, and the slide show is archived here (it’s a pdf): http://acwi.gov/monitoring/webinars/social.water.pdf

It’s pretty interesting; they put signs up near the staff gages with a station number and a note saying “text water level to (xxx)xxx-xxxx” and anybody walking by can participate. Some of the biggest contributors are people who walk their dogs by the gages on a regular basis, but there are also random participants.

All the contact information is in the linked presentation.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Kim Cressman
SWMP Coordinator
Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve
228-860-1957 Cell
228-475-7047 Office
kimberly.cressman@dmr.ms.gov

From: ecovrar (ecovrar@gmail.com)
Date: Nov 20, 2012

There is also SnowTweets out of the University of Waterloo (CA):

http://snowcore.uwaterloo.ca/snowtweets/

From: Filbert, Jennifer M – DNR (jennifer.filbert@wi.gov)
Date: November 02, 2012

We have a mobile-friendly version of the data entry screens for our Surface Water Integrated Monitoring System (SWIMS) database.

I foresee us continuing to work on it little by little, especially to beautify it.

For now, it’s simple, and it does work. It is not an app you install on a phone, but a mobile-friendly web page.

This was forwarded via Kris Stepenuck from a different listserv having a similar discussion:

From: Steve Kerlin
Date: November 28, 2012 6:57:20 PM CST
To: “environmentalscience@list.nsta.org” , “” , Teri Censoplano
Subject: Water Quality App

Here’s one iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch app that we just developed and released on the apple app store. We pilot tested and routinely use different parts of it with stream study programs for 4-12 grade students. Some parts we also use with college students and citizen science groups.

Greetings all,
Our “Water Quality” app Version 1.0 is now available on the Apple App Store for iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touch! You can find it by searching for the title “Water Quality”. The app includes stream study data collection and information to understand the data that was collected in sections for site profiles, chemical and bacterial sampling, and macroinvertebrates (digital field guide and Pollution Tolerance Index calculator). Only $4.99, and most of the revenue goes directly back into water education programs and maintenance of the app.

The Water Quality App 1.0 includes the following features and functions:
Site Profile – pictures, gps location and map, waterway naming, date, air temperature, water level, weather in past 48 hours.
Measurements – dissolved oxygen (concentration and saturation), biochemical oxygen demand, E.coli, fecal coliforms, pH, water temperature at site and upstream, phosphates, nitrates, turbidity (tube, and secchi disc), conductivity, and water hardness.
Benthic Macroinvertabrates – PTI three and four taxa automatically calculated, stonefly, mayfly, caddisfly, dobsonfly, riffle beetle, water penny, right-handed snail, damselfly, dragonfly, sowbug, scud, crane fly, clam/mussel, crayfish, midge, black fly, planaria, leech, left-handed snail, aquatic worms, blood midge, rat-tailed maggot.
Each measurement and macro has a pop-up that helps the user make sense of the parameter, what the data they collect means in terms of water quality, pictures, and other information.

Here is the link to find it in the iTunes App Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/water-quality/id569193509?mt=8
Here is some more information about the app as a short press release from one of our technical programmers. We should have a more formal press release soon.
http://aaroncorsi.com/waterquality/
River on the Web (ROW) is the accompanying website with more water quality information and curriculum:
http://row.nku.edu/

Thank you,
Steve Kerlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Science & Environmental Education
Director of the Center for Environmental Education
http://environmentaleducation.nku.edu/
Northern Kentucky University
272 MP
859-572-6380

Discussion 5

From: Darlene Cavalier (darcav1@gmail.com)
Sent: November 14, 2012

SciStarter is hosting a forum with Cornell this week. We’re hoping to learn more about the tools/technologies currently being used for citizen science as well as features people would like to see.

This is part of a small, Sloan-funded research project. This week-long forum closes on Friday.

Can you please share this link with your network? I’m particularly interested in hearing from the water-quality monitoring community. They are missing from the conversation.

Thanks for considering.

http://www.citizenscience.org/community/blog/2012/11/09/what-tools-and-technologies-are-powering-new-frontiers-for-your-citizen-science-projects/

Darlene

Responses to Discussion 5

From: Streamkeepers (streamkeepers@co.clallam.wa.us)
Date: Nov 16 , 2012

Streamkeepers of Clallam County, located on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, is set to launch a mobile website for entry of turbidity data during stormwater events. This will be closely followed by a mobile website for entering water quality monitoring data, with a launch date in early 2013. Our ultimate goal is to turn these into mobile apps so connectivity is not required, as many of our monitoring sites are quite remote.

Jinx Bryant, volunteer
Streamkeepers of Clallam Country
Clallam County Public Works-Roads
Port Angeles, WA 98362

Discussion 6

From: Jean Pillo <jean.pillo@conservect.org>
Date: Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 10:21 AM
Subject: [volmonitor] Stream Walk Data App?

In Connecticut, we have a volunteer monitoring program developed by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.  The NRCS Stream Walk program involves visual assessments of stream conditions.  Besides general questions for each stream reach on substrate types, depth, width and other stream morphology information, there are separate data sheets for different Areas of Concern including storm water outfalls, blocked fish passage, excessive plant growth, diminished riparian cover, etc.  We can get a lot of great information but translating the info into a report is very time consuming.  Does any monitoring group have an app for a tablet type computer where you can fill out the data sheet in the field, get a GPS point of the location and take a picture all at the same time?

Jean Pillo, Watershed Conservation Coordinator
Eastern Connecticut Conservation District
www.conservect.org/eastern
860-928-4948 x 605

 

Responses to Discussion 6

From: Josephine Mooney
Date: Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 11:37 AM
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Stream Walk Data App?

Hi Jean,
Regarding your inquiry for a mobile app…
I am a citizen scientist myself and am being trained as a Master Watershed Steward in Howard County, MD. I have attended many EPA citizen science events for both personal and professional engagement with this community.
I work for a mobile app company committed to working with citizen science projects. We would love to work with you to develop the mobile app tool you are looking for. We offer deep discounts to non profits.
Please review the Environmental Solutions Practice (ESP) brochure at this link:
http://elicere.com/Documents/ESP_Brochure_final1.aspx
or see an overview at this link: http://elicere.com/Services/Environmental-Solutions.aspx
Then please give me a call or send an email and we will arrange to discuss how we can create a custom mobile app to fit your exact needs and those of other citizen scientists.
I am working from home today if you want to call me I can be reached at 443-82 0-7360 or 757-589-5421 on my cell.

Warm regards,
Josephine Mooney

Director of Communications
Elicere, Inc.
400 N Washington St, Suite 301
Falls Church, VA 22046
http://www.elicere.com
Direct: 703.226.4240
Fax: 703.237.0395
Email: jmooney@elicere.com

 

From: Sid Feygin
Date: Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 1:03 PM
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Stream Walk Data App?

Hi Jean,

There are also several open source projects that could easily be adapted to your needs. Open Data Kit (http://opendatakit.org/) is an evolving and robust framework for distributed survey-based data collection via smartphone apps. I’ve worked on adapting this software for specific mobile survey-collection uses before. They provide several resources that could guide you in the right direction and have a history of non-profits leveraging their software for uses such as yours. Surveys can be populated via excel or their online form builder.
Worth a look.

-Sid

 

From: Steve Kerlin
Date: Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 2:09 PM
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Stream Walk Data App?

We have just started the process to create an app for stream habitat assessment. We hope to have it completed by this summer. It will very closely follow the EPA form for stream habitat assessment. Our stream habitat assessment app will be independent or also used within the set of apps for water quality. The base app, currently available from apple is called WaterQuality. We are already using the functionality of automatic GPS location and the ability to take pictures with the current app and will carry this through to the habitat assessment app.

Steve Kerlin, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Science & Environmental Education
Director of the Center for Environmental Education
Northern Kentucky University
MEP 272
859-572-6380

 

From: Judy Rondeau
Date: Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 2:15 PM
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Stream Walk Data App

Is the base app only available on iphone or is it android compatible? we were looking for something like a rugged tablet that could take pictures and collect GPS locations. anyone know of a tablet that will do this?

Judith C. Rondeau,CPESC
Natural Resource Specialist/
Niantic River Watershed Coordinator
Eastern CT Conservation District
238 West Town Street
Norwich, CT 06360-2111
860-887-4163 x401
judy.rondeau@comcast.net

http://conservect.org/eastern
http://www.nianticriverwatershed.org

 

From: Julie Wood
Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 1:51 PM
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Stream Walk Data App?

Charles River Watershed Association (CRWA) has developed an App for our volunteer monitoring program which lets our volunteers submit data, photos and GPS locations from their smart phone. It is presently only available for the Android platform but we are looking for funding to build a iOS Application as well. Because it is only available on Android it is presently only utilized by a small number of our volunteers as part of a pilot launch of the program.

Feel free to follow up directly with any additional questions.

Julie Wood
Senior Scientist
Charles River Watershed Association
190 Park Road
Weston, MA 02943
t 781.788.0007 x225
f 781.788.0057

 

From: Shelby Gull Laird [mailto:shelby.gull.laird@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 08, 2013 7:29 PM
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Stream Walk Data App?

Seems like there could be a desire for a list of apps developed (both stream walking/observation and more technical monitoring apps) and also information on whether or not they can be applied broadly or are only applicable to one particular region?

I would be interested in compiling that list and then sharing it and giving it to whoever can publicize it OR does this list already exist and would someone be willing to share it?

Thanks,
->shelby

Dr Shelby Gull Laird, CEE
Lecturer in Outdoor Recreation & Environmental Education
School of Environmental Sciences
Institute for Land, Water and Society
Charles Sturt University
PO Box 789, Albury NSW 2640, Australia
slaird@csu.edu.au
Office: +61 2 6051 9764
Mobile: +61 0468 753 856
http://www.linkedin.com/in/shelbygulllaird

 

From: Mayio, Alice
Date: Thu, May 9, 2013 at 10:00 AM
Subject: RE: [volmonitor] Stream Walk Data App?

Shelby – I think it would be great to compile a list of current apps with volunteer monitoring applications. I think there are a lot out there and the number is growing; there’s a lot of interest in seeing how technology can advance or improve the quality, quantity, and sharing of our data, as well as engage and interest the volunteers. Here are some examples of apps we’ve highlighted in our Volunteer Monitoring News e-newsletter (available at http://acwi.gov/monitoring/vm/newsletters.html) but there are many more, I’m sure.
Alice Mayio

USEPA

Phyto Smartphone App Helps Volunteers Identify Marine Phytoplankton

Phyto is a free smartphone application that helps volunteers identify marine phytoplankton by providing images of salt water species taken with a light microscope. It also includes a flash card game to help volunteers improve their ID skills. Phyto was developed by volunteer Shawn Gano with the Phytoplankton Monitoring Network (PMN), a national network of volunteers monitoring for coastal algal blooms. The goals of the PMN are to increase public awareness about harmful algal blooms (HABs) and maintain an extended monitoring area along U.S. coasts throughout the year. The PMN is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For more information about the PMN, visit http://www.chbr.noaa.gov/pmn/. To see the smartphone app, visit http://www.gano.name/shawn/phyto/ (for iPhone and iPad) or http://www.gano.name/shawn/phyto_android/ (for Android phones).

iPhone App for Charleston Waterkeeper: Charleston Waterkeeper has designed an app to engage and involve citizens in, on, and around Charleston’s waterways. The app allows citizens to report problems such as oil spills, discharging pipes, excessive marine debris, abandoned boats, and under water hazards using a reporting process that is as easy and informative as possible. It also helps citizens find information about local waters and follow the tweets and blog postings of the Charleston Waterkeeper organization. For more information, visit: www.charlestonwaterkeeper.org.

University of Northern Kentucky “Water Quality” App

“Water Quality” app Version 1.0, developed for k-12 but also in use by volunteer monitors, is now available on the Apple App Store for iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touch. The app includes stream study data collection and information to understand the data that were collected for site profiles, chemical and bacterial sampling, and macroinvertebrates (digital field guide and Pollution Tolerance Index calculator). The app costs $4.99, and most of the revenue goes directly back into water education programs and maintenance of the app. River on the Web (ROW) is the accompanying website with more water quality information and curriculum: visit http://row.nku.edu

California’s Creek Watch App: Creek Watch is an application that enables people to help monitor the health of their local watershed. Whenever passing by a waterway they can spend a minute using the Creek Watch application to snap a picture and report how much water and trash is seen. Creek Watch aggregates the data and shares it to help watershed groups and agencies track pollution and manage water resources. A map on the Creek Watch Website http://creekwatch.org displays data that’s already been contributed. Data is also accessible in table form. The application is now available as a free download in the iTunes App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/creek-watch/id398420434?mt=8http://creekwatch.org

 

On September 9, 2013 a list of apps was created: [table id=4 /]

Discussion 7

From: Brook Frusher
Date: Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 1:05 PM
Subject:[volmonitor] Low Cost Sampling Methods / Volunteer Programs

Hello Everyone!

I am currently interning for my local Soil and Water Conservation District, and we are trying to find some low-cost, reliable sampling methods that will not only allow us to increase the amount of streams we can sample, but will also be easy for volunteer groups to use.

If anyone has suggestions about methods and equipment, and/or volunteer program ideas that I can test out, it would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks
–Brooke Frusher

Responses to Discussion 7

From: Steve Kerlin
Date: Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 10:37 AM
Subject: Re: [volmonitor] Low Cost Sampling Methods / Volunteer Programs

We recently released an app called WaterQuality for iPads, iPhones, and iPod touch devices. The cost is only $4.99 from the Apple iTunes store. The majority of the revenue goes directly back into water education programs. It is a great way to organize and make sense of data that you collect when doing stream studies. You can’t connect iPads directly to sampling devices for the chemical and bacterial sampling yet but the app does include a digital field guide for macro invertebrates. The macro invertebrate section includes pictures, sketches, identification information for all of the macros used by the watershed watch groups and the EPA. It also automatically calculates the Pollution Tolerance Index for both 3 and 4 taxa groups.

Here is the link to find it in the iTunes App Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/water-quality/id569193509?mt=8

Here is some more information about the app as a short press release from one of our technical programmers. We should have a more formal press release soon.
http://aaroncorsi.com/waterquality/

River on the Web (ROW) is the accompanying website with more water quality information and curriculum:
http://row.nku.edu/

Steve Kerlin, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Science & Environmental Education
Director of the Center for Environmental Education
Northern Kentucky University
272 MP
859-572-6380

Categories
Listserv

Dam Removal Monitoring

Question

Date: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:07:18 -0400
From: Danielle Donkersloot
Subject: [volmonitor] dam removal question

Does anyone have experience removing dams 9 ft high +? Looking for info on designing a monitoring program. Thanks

Responses

Date: Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:21:00 -0500
From: “Skopec, Mary [DNR]”

Luther Aadland would be a great place to start. He works for the Minnesota DNR and has pioneered work in dam removal. The program and his contact info can be found in the link below:
http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/eco/streamhab/index.html
We’ve just begun working on dam removal/modification in Iowa and have developed some preliminary plans to monitor the stream improvement. I am happy to share our information if anyone is interested.
Mary Skopec, Ph.D.
Watershed Monitoring and Assessment Section
Iowa DNR

 

Date: Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:08:19 -0500
From: Holly Hudson

In Kane County, IL, a water quality and biological monitoring program was designed and conducted for a dam removal project on Brewster Creek. The project webpages provide more information. I believe there was a QAPP for this project, which was partially funded by a 319 grant. If the information you seek cannot be found through the project webpages, let me know and I can look up contact information.
http://www.co.kane.il.us/kcstorm/brewster/index.asp
Best Regards,
–Holly

Holly Hudson
Senior Aquatic Biologist
NE Illinois VLMP Coordinator
Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP)
233 S Wacker Dr Ste 800
Chicago IL 60606
ph: (312) 454-0400; (312) 386-8700 direct
fax: (312) 454-0411; (312) 386-8701 direct
e-mail: hhudson@cmap.illinois.gov

 

Date: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:24:43 -0400
From: “Rathbun, Joseph (DEQ)”

What issues do you want to measure? The document below is a good start,
and I have many more publications on this topic if you get me some
details.

Joe
http://www.gulfofmaine.org/streambarrierremoval/