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i i Sally Sedgwick is 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 tribu- taries 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 mare conscious about develop- ment," 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 anon-profit organization with the stated mission of pro- tecting and improving the surface and ground water resources and the natural sys- terns 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 solu= bons to everyday concerns in areas like water quality, pointed out Executive Director Gordon Cumming.. Six years ago it began ro recruit citizen monitors to perform basic and regular measurements at locations through- out 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 data- base called "STOREY" 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 human-made and natural processes. In 2000 there were 18 active moni- tors. Each year this has increased until now there are almost 50. Some have stayed dur- ing 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 moni- tor program for the CRWP until recently. Actively recruiting volunteers through word of mouth, referrals, promo- tional information and sometimes direct requests to landowners in sensitive areas, the CRWP keeps in close contact with its moni- tors by collecting the data and publishing a monthly newsletter. Once a year a recogni- tion 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 mon- itoringled to building a "bug hotel" to collect invertebrates from streams for identification. The .types of organisms can be a sensitive indicator of rive)-. 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 MPCAs Citizen Stream Monitoring Program. Each volunteerhas a 60 cm transparency tube and a qualitative summary sheet for field obsetva- tion. Data collected is also made available to the public ',online by a map-based search through the MPCA web site at _~~ ; ~ _ _ ;~ t - ; F~ i ~ ,: { - } -~::s ~ _ i 1 + ; R ^ 5.~lir ~ N ~: ~: : ~ y a 3 `~ 4 y S _.f`wJ~ N H -~ ~ -^ a ~ ~~ .1 0 ~ -~_ T ~f m ~:'` a Page 10