And they can be dressed up. Maps should accompany every report or presentation. Show your monitoring locations in relation to familiar landmarks to help the audience feel connected to your study. Include watershed boundaries and shoreline features to highlight the relationship between the water body and surrounding land uses. Portray your coliform data on a map that also shows locations of dairy farms.
Color maps make a particularly strong impact.
For example, document thermal impacts of deforestation with different stream reaches colored blue, green, yellow, and red. For newspapers that require black and white, use simple patterns or shades of gray. Enlist the amateur photographers among your volunteers to photograph your program in action. That map showing fecal coliform data in relation to dairy farms will pack an even bigger punch if you add a photo of a cow making a bank deposit. Sometimes photos themselves provide all the data you need.