Fresh Water Studies Commons^™

Illinois River Volunteer Monitoring, L.B. Massey, B.E. Haggard

Technical Reports

Understanding how water quality conditions change along a land use gradient and over time is important for sustainable watershed management. Therefore, a volunteer monitoring program was created to measure water chemistry at 37 established sites within the Upper Illinois River Watershed and to evaluate changes in water chemistry over the past 15 years. The Illinois River Watershed Partnership (IRWP), a non‐profit organization subcontracted with the Arkansas Water Resources Center at the University of Arkansas, to manage the volunteer monitoring project, train volunteers to collect samples following EPA approved methods, and to analyze the collected samples. The AWRC trained 27 volunteers …