Rationale Environmental monitoring is increasingly difficult for management agencies as budget cutbacks have eliminated resources for gathering this much needed data. The use of students to collect environmental data is not a new idea, but one that has only recently become more accepted and used. As concern over the well-being of the environment has risen during the past couple of decades, volunteer monitoring has become an integral part of the effort to assess the health of our nation's waters. Government agencies, often strapped by financial limitations, have found that volunteer programs can provide high quality reliable data to supplement their own water quality monitoring programs. Clarifying and characterizing the problems unique to an estuary help clear the path towards potential solutions.
Estuaries are transitional zones that encompass a wide variety of environments.
Loosely categorized as the zone where fresh and salt water meet and mix, the estuarine environment is a complex blend of continuously changing habitats. The estuary itself is a rather well-defined body of water, bounded at its mouth by the ocean and at its head by the upper limit of the tides. It drains a much larger area, however, and pollutant-producing activities near or in tributaries even hundreds of miles away may still adversely affect the estuary's water quality. Estuarine Pollution Estuaries across the country are vulnerable to assault from a wide variety of toxic substances. While not every citizen monitoring program will have the desire or money to sample each of these parameters, most programs will choose at least a couple as indicators of ecosystem status.