Most of all, you will need time to make contacts in the community, design your monitoring plan, develop training sessions, recruit volunteers, revise the program as it matures, raise funds, analyze the data, and report back to the volunteers and the community. A pilot project that serves to test out methods, training sessions, and organizational skills can keep you from being overwhelmed and allows you to evaluate and refine your project before moving on to more ambitious efforts. Chances are slim that your data will ever be used in court to stop a polluter. Data collected for such regulatory purposes requires a very high degree of quality assurance. Most volunteer data is used to educate the community and to screen for potential problems.
Planning pays off.
Beware of collecting a year's worth of data and then finding that you have no idea how to analyze it, that the methods you used are not considered valid, or that you sampled sites in the wrong locations. The more people you talk to in your community and within local and state agencies, the more friends and supporters your program will have. Include potential data users in all phases of your project's development. Develop volunteer leadership. Volunteer leaders within a project provide the vision for setting goals and the commitment to achieve them.