PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 13: Ecology Education I
Monday, August 8, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 520 C, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal

Volunteer community water quality monitoring and educational outreach.

Bergner, Regina ^{*,1, 2, 3}, Cooke, Ken ⁴, ¹ University of Louisville, Louisville, KY² Tetra Tech EM Inc., Prospect, KY³ Salt River Watershed Watch, Louisville, KY⁴ Kentucky Division of Water, Frankfort, KY

ABSTRACT- As resource management agencies struggle to do more with less funding, community water quality monitoring becomes an increasingly attractive option. As with any sampling program, quality assurance and quality control measures are required to ensure that educational training is standardized across the program, and sampling procedures are precise and replicable. If these and other QA/QC issues are addressed on a programmatic level, volunteer monitoring results can provide an effective screening tool for stream quality. Under the Kentucky Water Watch Program, volunteers across the state conduct synoptic sampling three weekends per year for little more than the price of the sampling equipment and analyses. These efforts represent tremendous labor and cost savings compared to agency expenditures required for a similar sampling event. Existing community education and outreach programs can be used to target and recruit volunteer monitors. Partnering efforts among local communities, nonprofit groups, and agency resources may be time-consuming at first, but over the long term, such partnerships have proven beneficial in terms of (1) increased community awareness of environmental issues and (2) improved community perceptions of agency efforts.

Key words: volunteer monitoring, water quality, education