Brief Descriptions of Potential Stream Team Projects
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Monitoring Projects
When you go to a doctor to check up on your health, he or she measures your temperature, pulse, blood pressure, breathing, and a number of other characteristics. Similarly, scientists sometimes study a number of stream characteristics to try to determine the health of a stream. Below is a list of some of those characteristics that your stream team might be interested in monitoring or doing.
Monitoring: Macroinvertebrates: Macroinvertebrates are small, spineless creatures that are still big enough to see without the aid of a microscope. Most streams have diverse and abundant populations of macroinvertebrates such as insect larvae, crustaceans, worms, and molluscs. These critters cling onto rocks, burrow into the stream bottom, and float in the water column. They are an important food source for many fish species. Different species of macroinvertebrates have varying levels of tolerance to stream pollution and degradation, so monitoring their communities can give an indication of how healthy your stream might be.
Monitoring: Water Chemistry and/or Water Temperature: Monitoring water temperature and chemistry can help determine the health of streams. Abnormal water temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, suspended solids, nutrients (such as nitrates and phosphates), and coliform bacteria conditions, when measured on a regular basis, may indicate that human disturbancesare occurring in the stream or adjacent land uses and need to be addressed.
Write a Quality Assurance Project Plan: Data credibility is one of the most difficult issues that volunteer monitoring groups face. Potential data users often are skeptical about volunteer data. They might have doubts about the goals and objectives of the project, how the volunteers are trained, how the samples were collected, handled, stored, etc. A quality assurance project plan (QAPP) is a document that outlines the procedures that will be used for a project, how equipment will be maintained, how samples will be collected and processed, how the data will be analyzed, etc. This plan typically is reviewed by an agency such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. An approved QAPP often lends more credibility to volunteer monitoring projects.
Some examples of QAPPs are available through the following pages (off-site):
- Education & Outreach - Survey --Protection & Restoration -
