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Monitoring Program
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Many of us living in Maine remember the stories of how the Androscoggin River use to look and smell; it wasn’t a place where people chose to spend their time. Thanks to Edmund Muskie, a Rumford native and author of the Clean Water Act things have certainly changed and once again people are coming back to the river as a source of recreation. For many people it’s a place to call home and at long last it is a resource recognized as worthy. But many of us are still asking the question, just how healthy is the river? Volunteers are needed from New Hampshire and Maine to be apart of a river wide water quality-monitoring program.
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The Androscoggin River Watershed council received a grant from The Stifler Family Foundation for the purpose of exploring that very question. This summer the council will continue to develop a river wide volunteer water quality monitoring program, utilizing appropriate quality assurance methods, aimed at collecting data at specific test sites along the 174-mile river corridor in Maine and New Hampshire. Goals of this program are to provide training for volunteers on monitoring techniques, assess the status of water quality along the Androscoggin, eventually including tributaries, and to determine whether water quality at sampling sites meets water quality standards.
A volunteer taking a water quality measurement
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In addition, ARWC hopes to identify specific existing or emerging water quality problems, identify changes or trends in water quality over time and provide timely and high-quality data to the public, state officials, school groups and other participating organizations.
Click on a site to go to information about the monitoring site and see a close up map from Google Earth.
Please note: You will need to disable any pop-up blocker on your browser to see these.
(Google Earth not required, but for their free download - click here)
ARWC measures dissolved oxygen, pH, conductivity, turbidity, water temperature and at certain sites test for E.Coli. Volunteer monitors collect data at sites twice per month, usually requiting about a two to three hour commitment each month.
Water Quality Monitoring Kit
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Come grow with us, if you are interested in learning more about this new ARWC program or would like to be a volunteer, please contact us, by emailing trek@megalink.net
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