Event Information: York College Stream Team Workshop, October 25, York, PA
Meet the first group of volunteers we trained to monitor the health of streams in the Chesapeake Bay watershed as part of our Stream Team program! This first Stream Team workshop resulted from a collaboration with the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper and York College with the goal of creating a group that could monitor streams near/on York College’s campus. Several ALLARM team members drove down to meet with students and faculty from the college over pizza.
We worked with the students on the volunteer protocol for monitoring streams and practiced our skills with the LaMotte Tracer PockeTester meter and chemical parameter kits on water samples. We hoped to foster stewardship of the stream and relate the importance of citizen science on collecting data for local resources. During the event, we discussed what makes an effective monitoring group and how to benefit the York area, as well as the larger scope of the watershed. The stream that runs through campus is a tributary of the Susquehanna River, and thus flows into the Chesapeake Bay. Because they are interconnected, the health of this stream also impacts the greater quality of these larger aquatic sources that we depend on.
We had fun working in small teams to analyze samples and compare results between teams. There was even a bit of competition between the teams of students and faculty! It was interesting to collaborate with students my age who were mostly engineering majors, as opposed to the majority of environmental science students at ALLARM. I liked learning from them about how the work we do at ALLARM relates to engineering and sustainable development. I look forward to working further with the Stream Team and learning what they find out about their waterways.
Training a group of York College students how to use the equipment