A network of open-source Do-It-Yourself water monitoring stations builds stakeholder capacity, research results, and water quality outcomes in the Delaware River Basin

Abstract:

For the last three years Stroud Water Research Center, with support from the Delaware River Watershed Initiative, has facilitated deployment of over 70 EnviroDIY Monitoring Stations on streams and rivers across the Delaware River Basin (DRB). These stations collect continuous data for parameters including electrical conductivity, water temperature, depth, and turbidity and transmit the data via cell signal to the Monitor My Watershed data portal. Stations were granted to and purchased by over 35 watershed groups for use in reaching their own research, educational, and outreach goals. In facilitating usage of the stations the Stroud Center’s primary goal is to build science and monitoring capacity across the DRB. This presentation will describe the methods that the Stroud Center has been using and is currently developing to support watershed groups in building citizen scientist involvement, generating viable data sets, and connecting people to their local water – all of this to support better management of water resources and education at the local level. The Stroud Center supports usage, maintenance, and quality control of these stations via manuals and other guidance documents, video tutorials, data sheets, online data entry, and several online communications platforms. Ongoing group activities for supporting usage of the stations have included multi-day watershed ecology courses, EnviroDIY Monitoring Station management workshops, EnviroDIY user-group gatherings, monthly EnviroDIY meetings, small group trainings on field maintenance and quality control, and 1:1 field assistance and on-site tutorials. We are conducting multi-site broad-scale data analyses to provide a big picture to help groups see how their streams compare to others, as well as showing anthropogenic and natural patterns across the DRB. At the local scale we are developing templates for summarizing individual site data in relation to regional reference conditions and in relation to state water quality criteria, as well as ecological thresholds.