Community Corner
Calling All Citizen Scientists!
QRWA gets $10,000 grant from 3M to train volunteers to take water samples along the Q River. Are you in?
For the past three years, the Quinnipiac River Watershed Association () has had to suspend its Rapid Bioassessment program because funding ran out. Now the program is back thanks to a $10,000 training grant from .
The program uses trained volunteer “citizen scientists” to take water samples at various points along the Quinnipiac River to see how healthy the river is. The first training session takes place Wednesday night at QRWA headquarters on Oregon Road at 7 p.m.
“Rapid Bioassessment is a way of checking the health of streams using the organisms that live there,” explains QRWA Executive Director Mary Mushinsky.
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Volunteers collect water samples along the river and the streams that feed into it. They examine each sample, looking for particular living creatures.
“When you find organisms that can only stand clean water, you know the water is clean,” Mushinsky says. “If we see that they were there one year and they have disappeared, we know the stream is deteriorating,” she continues.
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Once volunteers determine which creatures are in the water, they return most of the sample to its source and keep some to send to the DEEP for analysis.
Wednesday night’s two-hour training session gives an overview of the Rapid Bioassessment process. It will be led by volunteer trainers Becky Martorelli and Joanne Grabinski, who themselves have been trained by the DEEP.
Team leaders will be chosen for further hands-on training in the field on Saturday, October 15. Those volunteers will then lead their teams in collecting water samples on Saturday, October 22, and Saturday, November 5.
3M Corporation, the source of the grant, is not just footing the bill. Six employees from the Meriden plant will also take part in the training, according to Joe Struble, an environmental engineer for 3M who was involved in awarding the grant.
Struble says he has witnessed a transformation in the once severely polluted Q River thanks in large part to the restoration efforts of QRWA and its volunteers.
“Growing up in the area, the Quinnipiac River was known as a pretty dirty river,” he recalls. “Now to see eagles out by Hanover Pond is pretty amazing.”
