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Water Quality and Wills Creek
Cambridge...The
Wills Creek Water Quality Project recently held a training workshop hosted
at the Guernsey Soil and Water Conservation District office in Cambridge.
The purpose of this workshop was to educate community members in the many
aspects of watershed stewardship and invite them to become volunteers
in monitoring the streams and lakes in the Wills Creek watershed. The
water quality project is designed to provide information and education
to local residents on how to improve the water in the area. Individuals
from government agencies combined to offer their expertise about water
quality in seven presentations inside the building and streamside in the
field. At the conclusion of the workshop, the volunteers were invited
to join the monitoring efforts and sign up to help in sampling.
The water quality workshop included Dan Kush from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR)as Division of Soil and Water Conservation. He demonstrated the importance of volunteers in water monitoring programs by giving facts about the amount watershed groups around the country that are successful due to volunteers. Lora Meredith, Education Specialist, from Guernsey Soil and Water Conservation District explained how streams are harmed from non-point pollution. She demonstrated this by littering various drops of food coloring on a model of a community similar to Cambridge. Each drop of food coloring was meant to represent the pollutants that come from the things we do every day; like lawn fertilizers, soaps from car washing, and sediment moving off of recently plowed areas. When rain was applied by sprinkling water over top the model all of the small spots of pollution combined in the model as stream.
J.P. Lieser from the Ohio State University Extension and Gary Novak from ODNRas Mineral Resources Division also gave educational presentations on the characteristics of streams and the affects of past mining on local streams.
After traveling to a small tributary of Wills Creek just north of Cambridge, the volunteers learned various sampling techniques. Dan Imhoff from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) demonstrated how the volunteers can score a streamas habitat by looking at the vegetation and materials that make up the stream bed and streamside. The volunteers joined Dan Kush in the stream to see what types of aquatic insects were present. Parents and children splashed around in their hip waders holding onto special nets. They kicked up the rocks just upstream of the nets to detach the insects they wished to survey. Back on dry land with their nets full, Dan showed everyone how to score a stream as quality by what insects were present. The final treat for the volunteers was watching J.P. Lieser electrofishing. J.P. did this by using a special stream survey device that temporarily shocks fish. The fish were collected in nets and then placed into aquariums set up along the stream. Everyone got a good look at the fish that were caught before the fish were released back in the stream.
Crossroads Resource Conservation and Development Council, Inc. (RC&D) recently hired Paul Gledhill to lead the monitoring efforts in Wills Creek area. Paul will be monitoring streams and lakes in Guernsey and surrounding counties in the upcoming months