Conservation projects like reducing road salt in the Delaware River Basin are made possible because of community volunteers collecting data and doing some Delaware River Basin monitoring, writes Elizabeth DeOrnellas for Delaware Currents.
These volunteers help provide a detailed picture of how humans are impacting the Delaware River and its tributaries by focusing on smaller, more urban watersheds.
EnviroDIY maintains a network of more than 150 stream monitoring stations in the Delaware River Basin looked after by 50 watershed organizations.
Media resident Charlie Coulter uses skills from his 35-year career as an industrial instrument technician to monitor 35 EnviroDIY sites for anomalies in the reported data.
“Each site has its own personality or fingerprint,” Coulter said. “They all look different.”
The collected data can be used to measure the impact of road salt and how well aquatic life can thrive amidst temperature changes.
“What we’ve been finding is that, with proper support from organizations like the Stroud Center, there’s absolutely no reason why citizen science data, community science data, can’t be used for the same purposes that professional science data are used for,” said David Bressler, Stroud’s community science facilitator.
Find out more about how community volunteers are contributing to water monitoring data in Delaware Currents.
