Stream Monitoring Program returns to Rice Creek Watershed

Its time to get out those hip waders and help monitor the health of the Rice Creek Watershed!

This summer and fall, FMR will return to work on our second year on this exciting new initiative in the Rice Creek Watershed. The Stream Health Evaluation Program (SHEP) works with adult volunteers to monitor streams for biological health. Modeled after the successful Wetland Health Evaluation Program (WHEP), SHEP trains volunteers in stream monitoring techniques and invertebrate identification so the volunteers can provide reliable data for decision makers.

Why biological monitoring? Over the past 15 years, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) has developed new ways to assess the health of streams and wetlands by looking at which plants and insects live there. While chemical water quality sampling is also important, it can only show the quality of the water for a given set of parameters at a given period of time. Using plants and insects or biological monitoring, which surveys aquatic organisms that grow, develop and reproduce over time, provides a more complete picture of the ecological health of our waters and is a better predictor of long-term trends.

In 1997, in collaboration with local partners, MPCA scientists developed a citizen wetland biological monitoring program. The Wetland Health Evaluation Program (WHEP) is now an award-winning and nationally recognized program that uses citizen volunteers to monitor the biological health of local wetlands in Dakota and Hennepin Counties. SHEP is following the same model using streams instead of wetlands.

Three SHEP teams will monitor sites along Rice Creek and its tributaries. These sites are chosen for their location upstream or downstream of significant natural resource impacts, such as ditch maintenance and new suburban development, as well as water resource restoration projects. This will allow volunteers to identify and track trends in the ecological health of the stream as land uses change and management and restoration projects are implemented in the watershed. Once collected, data will be quality assured, a final report will be written and the results will be posted on all partner websites and will be shared with the public.

For more info about SHEP, contract Trevor at 6511-222-2193 x18 or through our contact form.