Water quality in Rhode Island improving, but still needs volunteer monitoring

It's been warmer and wetter on average over the past couple of months, which has water managers wondering about the effects on water quality this spring.

Volunteers are needed to help keep the decades long water testing database going at the University of Rhode Island.

It's because in part from URI's three-decades-long "Watershed Watch" that the actual water quality in the Ocean State has improved.

"The work that DEM and other agencies have been doing," said Elizabeth Herron with the University of Rhode Island's Water Watch Program, including "towns to control storm water, to manage their inputs into the watershed, it's working," despite more sprawl, and despite weather patterns that have resulted in warmer water.

Herron explained, "The water's warming earlier in the spring and staying warmer later into the fall, and that is allowing algae and other nuisance species to grow really well." Which is bad for the environment.

"We're seeing more precipitation in Rhode Island, and we're seeing it in big storms, dry periods, big storms, dry periods, which means that when we get rainfall, it has more energy, and it can move more stuff" such as road salt, pollutants from vehicles that get embedded in roadways, then washed into creeks, streams, and rivers, said Herron.

That's why strict methodical water testing by an army of volunteers is so important, by "collecting information on water clarity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll or algal content" to name a few, according to Herron.

Barbers Pond in South Kingstown's an example of how that volunteer monitoring program helped identify a source of pollution. There was "a shellfish processing plant nearby that used to make stuffed clams," recalled Herron, now nearly 30 years with the program.

"The waste has very high levels of phosphorous which is the perfect nutrient for plant growth including algae," she said. "We have really bad algal blooms, they fixed that. There's no longer a shellfish processing plant, no longer waste coming from there."

Being a water quality volunteer runs the gamut, from "middle school students that drag their parents along," added Herron, with a smile, to "working folks, retired folks, professionals, people who know absolutely nothing about science, and this is a way for them to learn about it."

To sign up and be part of the solution instead of the problem, click here.