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Taking Care of the Cannon River
BY SALLY SEDGWICK It's a lonely job. Why would a volunteer slog each week to a stream to take its pulse and check its health? It's a routine job, done alone. It often shows no change at all. Yet along the Cannon River and its tributaries up to 50 volunteers do just that. And the reasons range from the practical to the profound. B.J. Norman began taking basic measurements on Belle Creek just west of Red Wing as a destination for mile and a half walks done for exercise. She thought she "might as well have a mission." "It sounded like fun," she said, "and a very worthy project to be involved in." Six years later, she is still committed to her weekly visit to the creek. And she has found that she has a broadened sense of the interconnectedness of things. "I'm much more conscious about development," she said. When she sees land being leveled and parking lots replacing soil with asphalt, she thinks: "Excuse me....where is all that water going to go?" Belle Creek is part of the Cannon River watershed; an area covering 1,460 square miles and affecting 102,000 residents. Passing through largely agricultural areas, the Big Cannon River and the Straight River combine to form the Cannon, passing Owatonna, Faribault and Cannon Falls, and emptying into the Mississippi at Red Wing. It is a naturally beautiful area. And in 1990 a group of residents formed a non-profit organization with the stated mission of protecting and improving the surface and ground water resources and the natural systems of the watershed. It was to be called the Cannon River Watershed Partnership. Today the CRWP is an active organization with 140 members and volunteers beyond its membership. It's an organization that tries to find practical solutions to everyday concerns in areas like water quality, pointed out Executive Director Gordon Cumming. Six years ago it began to recruit citizen monitors to perform basic and regular measurements at locations throughout the watershed. Information collected by the monitors would feed into the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency's Citizen Monitors program and from there to the national database called "STORET" for "storage and retrieval." The information would not only form a baseline for existing water quality, but also give information on the dynamics of how surface water was affected by manmade and natural processes. In 2000 there were 18 active monitors. Each year this has increased until now there are almost 50. Some have stayed during the whole program. Why this level of commitment? One reason is that they see the value of what they do. Even "no change" is important information, pointed out Justin Watkins, who coordinated the citizen monitor program for the CRWP until recently. Actively recruiting volunteers through word of mouth, referrals, promotional information and sometimes direct requests to landowners in sensitive areas, the CRWP keeps in close contact with its monitors by collecting the data and publishing a monthly newsletter. Once a year a recognition event brings together volunteers for an interesting program on a topic about the ecology of the watershed, such as invasive species, archeology or area geology. Volunteers also have opportunities to broaden their understanding of water quality. One workshop on aquatic bug monitoring led to building a "bug hotel" to collect invertebrates from streams for identification. The types of organisms can be a sensitive indicator of river water quality. Belle Creek is very healthy, noted Norman with satisfaction. "She has lots of good bugs." The volunteers are supported with materials and equipment from the MPCA's Citizen Stream Monitoring Program. Each volunteer has a 60 cm transparency tube and a qualitative summary sheet for field observation. Data collected is also made available to the public online by a map-based search through the MPCA web site at www.pca.state.mn.us. Follow the links for "water" and "volunteer surface water monitoring." The CRWP also works with other environmental groups. As a result of a workshop with the Rivers Council of Minnesota, it now has a written stream monitoring program. That's important, pointed out Watkins, because it answers on paper the kinds of questions that are asked: what are the goals of the program, why are we doing it and how do we do it? Most measurements are made from a bridge, explained Richard Fetterly, who not only monitors two locations himself but whose adult children handle three additional sites. Using a bucket, a 60 cm long clear plastic tube is filled with water from the river. As this water is gradually let out of the tube a black and white design - called a secchi disk - can be seen through the column of water at the bottom. The length of the column of water that allows the design to be seen is a measure of clarity of the water. And the clarity of the water has been shown to be an excellent indicator of a number of other measures of river health such as suspended solids and turbidity, and leads to information about sediments, nutrients and even in some cases pathogens, said Watkins. In fact, the correlation to turbidity is so good with this simple measure that starting in 2006 the citizen generated data will become official data, and that means that official actions can be based on the measurements collected by the volunteers. It makes volunteer data collection even more valuable than he expected, said Fetterly, who has seen clarity as low as 1 cm over his six years of monitoring. Volunteers also take river temperature and water height measurements. The height can be measured by a tape from the river bottom up to the surface, or from the bridge down to the surface. The final observations are qualitative: what color is the water, does it appear suitable for recreation, can a picture be taken to document conditions at time of sampling? In addition to the weekly measurements, monitors are asked to respond to "rainfall events;" rainfall over 1 inch. How the system responds to the increased load of sediment carried by runoff is an indicator of how well the system is working, pointed out Norman. She witnessed a surprising result on Belle Creek last year during dry weather. The first rain appeared to have no effect. The second brought a gush of sediment. What she had seen was the effect when the ground finally became saturated. Volunteers like Norman and Fetterly are part of what the Rivers Council calls River Sentinels, about 4,000 nonprofessional citizens who are nevertheless excellent at watching their area's waters to protect them and find out where there are - and where there are not - problems, explained council board member Richard Lacher. It extends the capability of professional groups like the PCA many times and makes their efforts much more effective by allowing them to concentrate on area with real problems. And ultimately, that makes a difference to people like Fetterly, an avid trout fisherman. When he sees warnings about eating fish, "that doesn't give you a really good feeling," he said. "It's important to help preserve habitats for plants and animals," he believes, "over and above the human benefit." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sally Sedgwick is a freelance editor and writer who lives in the lake country of northern Minnesota. She can be reached at: sedgewick@paulbunyan.net |
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