Lawn fertilizer contributes additional nitrogen, as well as phosphorus, via runoff. To assess fecal contamination the Pond Watchers obviously needed to monitor bacteria, but they had to choose from among several possible indicator species and methods. These choices were dictated by their commitment to having their data used by the state's Department of Environmental Management to determine whether the ponds were safe for shellfishing. Rhode Island DEM follows these FDA requirements, so the Pond Watchers did, too. Robert Wiatrolik Bob Eisenhart, a volunteer with Illinois' Volunteer Lake Monitoring Program, lowers a Secchi disk into Lake Petersburg.
Secchi depth is the number one parameter tested by volunteer lake monitoring groups .
For the first two years, DEM was skeptical of our data. But by the third year they were finding the data so useful that they asked us to expand our program and sample at all DEM's stations - which we did. What they couldn't measure were the nutrients and chlorophyll. Based on previous research by University of Rhode Island scientists, they knew that nutrient levels would be too low to be accurately measured by field kits. Fortunately, the Pond Watchers were able to have nitrate, phosphorus, and chlorophyll a analyses performed in university research labs as an in-kind service.