Next year, the Delaware chapter of The Nature Conservancy plans to launch a program that uses citizen science to restore local waterways.
The program, called Stream Stewards, will corral high school and college students and state park volunteers to test water quality in the watersheds that intersect the First State National Park.
Richie Jones, who directs Delaware’s Nature Conservancy chapter, says getting citizens involved helps gather a lot of data on watersheds that they wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. On a larger level, he hopes the program will strengthen the connection between the public and their local waterways.
“It’s a way of engaging the public in water quality issues and by doing that we hope to increase people’s awareness that affect water quality in our watersheds," said Jones.
Jones added that our local watersheds suffer from a number of problems, from agricultural runoff to industrial contaminants from urban areas. These efforts are important, given the unseen costs of clean drinking water.
“The main concerns for the people who supply our drinking water, for instance, are sediments and nutrients. When those get high, we incur increased costs in filtering that out so that we can drink the water," said Jones.
Along with the First State National Park, the program will also partner up with the Stroud Water Research Center in Pennsylvania. The Nature Conservancy will start designing the program next month. Participating schools have yet to be determined.
The Nature Conservancy in Delaware received $430,000 grant from the William Penn Foundation to help fund this initiative. That grant will run for two years.
