Riverkeeper's Citizen Scientists Featured in Hood River News

By Lorri Epstein, Water Quality Director—

Riverkeeper's Water Quality Monitoring Program was recently featured in the Hood River News.  The article highlights some of our fabulous volunteers and includes a quote from Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) that states:

The CRK program has developed into a high-quality monitoring program that links a large number of volunteers together over a long stretch of the river.  That in itself is valuable, but the volunteers also do an excellent job of documenting the quality of the data they collect thereby providing useful data at a resolution that DEQ would never be able to achieve alone.  Some of this data has already identified opportunities to improve water quality.

The article followed the announcement that Riverkeeper volunteers submitted their water quality data to DEQ's "call for data".  The State of Oregon will use this data to conduct a statewide assessment of whether water bodies are meeting safety limits for swimming, fishing, and threatened salmon species.  Our volunteers submitted data from 77 sites on the Columbia River and Oregon tributaries. Forty-one of those sites (53%) had at least one violation of the state water quality standards.

View the full Hood River News article