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State-Based Volunteer Monitoring Programs
Great Bay Coast Watch's volunteers monitor the water quality of NH’s Great Bay and its tributaries. Since 1990, coastal communities in New Hampshire are better able to make informed decisions because of the Great Bay Coast Watch volunteer participation in the community.
The Maine Shore Stewards Program has successfully engaged citizen volunteers in environmental monitoring along the Maine coast since 1988. One hundred thousand acres of clam flats on the Maine coast were opened for harvest between 1990 and 2002 with the help of the Maine Shore Stewards.
The Massachusetts Water Watch Partnership (MassWWP), under the administration of the Water Resources Research Center at UMass, provides training and other technical assistance to citizen organizations that conduct water quality monitoring programs on the lakes, rivers, and estuaries of MA. MassWWP developed and published the Massachusetts Volunteer Coastal Monitoring- General Quality Assurance Project Plan (QAPP), a generic QAPP offered online that contains baseline requirements of a stringent EPA-quality assurance and quality control guideline to ensure that volunteer-collected data is of the highest quality and therefore useful to local decision makers.
The New Hampshire Lakes Lay Monitoring Program (LLMP) has grown into an internationally recognized volunteer monitoring program and has developed a database for determining long-term trends in lake water quality for science and management. This database is often incorporated into various water quality research projects. As a result of actions initiated by LLMP on Lake Chocorua, volunteers documented a water quality decline due to highway runoff. A multi-agency taskforce, including Extension, collaborated to design and implement a series of best management practices to mitigate the road runoff. Post implementation monitoring demonstrated an 84 to 92 percent reduction in phosphorus loads to the lake from highway sources.
In New York, Cornell University Cooperative Extension sponsors volunteer water quality monitoring programs:
Community Water Watch Program
Hudson River SAV Project
As a result of Hudson River estuary volunteer-collected submerged aquatic vegetion (SAV) mapping and outreach program, regulators in New York are now aware of SAV habitat and are doing what they can to protect SAV through existing laws. Additional protection of buffer areas surrounding SAV habitat will require amending state conservation laws.
The URI Watershed Watch Program (URIWW) focuses on providing current information on the water
quality of surface water resources throughout RI. It is a service provider to statewide and local
decision-makers and is the sole source of long-term
lake water quality data for RI. URIWW
monitoring efforts on Stafford Pond motivated local
residents and farmers to determine the cause of water quality problems within the watershed.
As a result, manure management practices on a nearby
farm were improved and stormwater problems were rectified. The efforts
fostered further watershed collaboration with other
URI CE Water Quality projects.
UVM Watershed Alliance supports state-wide watershed education and water quality monitoring of rivers and streams in VT schools and youth groups. The Watershed Alliance provides schools with curricula, written materials, equipment to monitor, and resource assistants, trained undergraduates who help teachers facilitate monitoring. Watershed Alliance students “citizen scientists” disseminate their findings to planning commissions, school boards, watershed groups, parents and approximately 10,000 Vermonters via television programming. Read this highlighted program description for additional information.
The Watershed Stewards Program is training Maine residents to identify sources of pollution for priority watersheds and work toward eliminating them. The program provides 20 hours of classroom and field training related to water quality, in return for 20 hours of volunteer watershed service. Within each series of trainings, a NH Dept. of Environmental Protection staff member describes status and trends, using volunteer monitoring information. The program also partners with the nonprofit Maine Volunteer Lake Monitoring Program. Lake monitors are often the first ones to sign up for the Watershed Stewards Programs and Watershed Stewards may commit their volunteer time to lake monitoring.
