Photos by Paul Gillespie for The Capital
These volunteers take samples at Glebe Branch near 214
– by Mitchelle Stephenson for The Capital published April 17, 2008
Lee Ann Candon and her niece traipsed down an embankment and through raspberry brambles until they arrived at a gently-flowing tributary known as Glebe Creek.
They donned their latex gloves and immediately got to work collecting water samples.
The pair were among the volunteers participating in the South River Federation's annual Watershed Snapshot event last month. The group recruits volunteers to sample water from 47 sites around the watershed to determine the state of the South River and its tributaries.
This year, the West/Rhode Riverkeeper joined in with an additional nine sites. The two groups had more than 40 volunteers working as "scientists for the day."
Lee Ann, of Edgewater, was one of the volunteers collecting samples for the South River snapshot. She was assigned Glebe Creek, and was tasked with retrieving water samples from two locations, one near Central Avenue and the other behind homes in the residential community of South River Colony.
This was Lee Ann's third year of helping to conduct the research. She brought her 6-year-old niece, Ella Reiter of Bowie, along as her assistant. They parked alongside the road in Edgewater, on Central Avenue between South River High School and Muddy Creek Road.
"Volunteering for this event opens your eyes to the water in your area. For example, driving down (Route) 214, most people don't even know there is a watershed here," Lee Ann said.
Having volunteered in the past for the Watershed Snapshot, she remarked that she used to be one of those people. Now, she has a better appreciation for where there are little streams and waterways.
She said this awareness has helped her to be a better caretaker of the environment. She now stops along the roadway to pick up trash.
Lee Ann attended training earlier in the week, and was one of the volunteers selected to use newly introduced field labs.
In the past, volunteers collected the samples and brought them back to the meeting place. From there, the samples were taken to a lab and tested for a variety of things: plant and animal life, pH, turbidity, nitrogen, phosphorus and more.
The field lab Lee Ann was using could conduct those same tests in the field, giving immediate results. This year both in-the-lab tests and the field labs were used to see if the field labs are worth the investment.
On Saturday the designated meeting place was the South County Senior Center in Edgewater.
After the volunteers brought their buckets back, Department of Natural Resources biologist Chris Trumbauer, a volunteer for the South River Federation, checked in the samples, one-by-one.
The volunteers had not only drawn water samples, they also had collected data which will be incorporated into a final report. The Watershed Snapshot Report will be presented sometime in June at a South River Federation general membership meeting.
Some of the information collected on Saturday included weather conditions, land use, water temperature, water flow, water odor, clarity, the presence of plant life, animal life and organic matter, the condition of the stream bottoms and any other important information like whether there was trash or other debris in or around the waterway.
Zach Thomas of Annapolis volunteered to collect samples for the West/Rhode Riverkeeper. This was Zach's first year doing the sampling.
Zach sampled water from two locations - Blue Jay Branch and the north fork of Muddy Creek.
Zach, who moonlights as the West/Rhode Riverkeeper's volunteer coordinator, said "We saw what other groups like South River have been doing and decided to join them."
South River Federation is assisting West/Rhode by helping with their data analysis.
Chris had a system for differentiating the samples that the volunteers were bringing in. The federation used white buckets and he assigned West/Rhode red buckets. They all used the same forms and asked the volunteers the same questions.
"One of the questions is, 'What is the biggest problem at the site you visited and how would you fix it?'" he said.
The kind of feedback the federation gets from the volunteers is very useful in determining how the federation will allocate resources in the coming year, he said.
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