New England Extension programs have over 1,500 volunteers monitoring more than 850 rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, reservoirs, private drinking water wells, wetlands, estuaries, and marine environments in New England.
Great
Bay Coast Watch's 
volunteers
monitor the water quality of NH’s
Great Bay and its tributaries. The program is supported
by the University
of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension and
the NH
Sea Grant Programs
. 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 associated
with the UMaine Cooperative Extension Water Quality 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 Amherst Environmental
Institute ,
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) a
joint effort of UNH
Cooperative Extension's Water Resources Program and
the UNH
Center for Freshwater Biology ,
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.
Several NH communities presented ideas for water resource protection to their local decision makers as a result of the information contained in this database For more information, contact Jeff
Schloss.
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.
The URI Watershed Watch Program (URIWW) ,
with the URI
Cooperative Extension Water Quality Program ,
focuses on providing current information on the water
quality of surface water resources throughout Rhode
Island. 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
Cooperative Extension projects including URI Home*A*Syst , Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials (NEMO) program, and On-site Wastewater Training Center .
UVM Watershed Alliance ,
a partnership of UVM
Extension , Lake
Champlain Sea Grant ,
and the Rubenstein
School of the Environment and Natural Resources ,
supports state-wide watershed education and water quality
monitoring of
rivers and streams in Vermont middle schools, secondary
schools, alternative education programs, 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 of
UMaine Cooperative Extension Water Quality 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.