The event will be similar to Water Snapshot '98 covering all watersheds in Pennsylvania. Dates for the next survey are April 16-25, 1999. Hopefully you can plan your monitoring activities around this time. More than 100 organizations including schools, volunteer monitoring groups and resource agencies were part of Snapshot '98.
People monitor water quality for many different reasons.
One reason is to demonstrate the commitment we have for clean water in our communities. Another is to help increase awareness of the importance of good water quality to all of us. Biomonitoring, or the study of biological organisms and their responses, is an alternative that can be done as a stand alone assessment or integrated with physical and chemical testing to give a holistic view of your stream's health. Because living organisms integrate all the positive and negative impacts an ecosystem has felt, ecosystem health can be measured by the diversity of the creatures living in it. Some programs use aquatic plants, fish, birds or reptiles and amphibians as water quality indicators, but the most widely used approach relies on macroinvertebrates to indicate stream health.