About the Aquatic Monitoring Program

In 1995, The Xerces Society began a collaborative effort with government agencies, conservation organizations and volunteer groups to tie together efforts on managing aquatic resources in the Northwest. Monitoring our stream resources provides not only baseline information on the biodiversity of stream fish, amphibians and invertebrates but also gives us a relative scale at which to judge the health of a watershed as a whole. This technique, called bioassessment, utilizes instream assemblages of organisms to indicate the degree of impact that current land management practices have on the water quality and biological integrity. Nationally, most state and federal agencies are using bioassessment to identify and monitor streams that are being impacted by poor management. The strength of this technique is that it can be used by scientists and volunteers, regardless of background, to gather high quality, usable data.

The goal of Xerces Aquatic Monitoring Project is to provide policy-makers with information, assistance and materials that will lead to better management strategies for forests, streams and rivers. Our focus is to apply the technique of bioassessment at a grass-roots level and help interested citizen groups to become involved with the science and management of their watersheds. Because federal and state funding supports aquatic monitoring in relatively few Northwest watersheds, volunteer monitoring teams are the key to producing sufficient data to make a difference in decision making.

The Xerces Society is coordinating several projects that integrate policymakers and volunteer groups to both educate and enhance management in our watersheds. We are currently testing protocols for using macroinvertebrates in bioassessment of Pacific Northwest wetlands. We have an extensive volunteer training program that trains citizens how to collect and use macroinvertebrates as stream monitors. Our technical assistance provides interested scientists and citizen groups access to bioassessment techniques and protocols, both on-line and through workshops and personal discussions. We also coordinate the yearly Northwest Bioassessment Workgroup Taxonomic Workshop for laboratories and biologists. These workshops bring together taxonomists from six states to standardize taxonomy and ecological data from the Northwest.