The first ever Alabama Water Watch Virtual Annual Meeting was a success! Although we weren’t able to meet in person for our Annual Meeting this year, we are thankful that we still got the opportunity to recognize and highlight our volunteers in a meaningful way.
If you weren’t able to join us for the meeting this year, read on for a brief recap of the events of the day…
The meeting kicked off with an exciting update from the Director of the Alabama Cooperative Extension System (ACES), Dr. Gary Lemme, and the Associate Director of the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, Dr. Henry Fadamiro…the introduction of the Auburn University Water Resource Center’s (WRC) new Director, Dr. Eve Brantley! (You can read more about Dr. Brantley here).
This exciting announcement was followed by AWW, WRC, and AWW Association program updates from the past year. You can view these updates in the 2019 Alabama Water Watch Annual Report (click here or visit the AWW website). We also took a moment to appreciate everyone’s favorite water spots!
We were excited to share the work of a few of our volunteers through a special video presentation during the meeting (which you can view here on our Facebook page). This presentation kicked off the 2020-2021 Volunteer Highlights Project, an initiative to regularly recognize the hard work, passion, and dedication of our volunteers. Thank you to all of our volunteers who contributed submissions! (Keep an eye out on our social media, blog, and Youtube channel for more volunteer highlights in the near future!)
Our volunteer monitors and trainers are known to go above and beyond the call of duty, and this year was no different! It was a honor to recognize our hard working volunteers during our Annual Awards Ceremony, The Caddy’s. (click here to read more about the award winners)
And the 2019 Caddy’s went to…
Janne Debes – Michael Mullen Monitor of the Year Award
Mimi Fearn – Trainer of the Year
Jackie McGonigal – Emerging Trainer of the Year
Zoe Nye – 4-H Water Watcher of the Year
Thank you to all of our award winners, meeting participants, volunteers, board members, and partners – you make AWW the AWWesome program that exists today!
The 2021 Annual Meeting date and location areTBD but will be announced soon! If you know a venue in the Birmingham area that would be great for next year’s Annual Meeting, please let us know!
Keep an eye out for more information on some exciting new initiatives…
AWW volunteers have collected over 97,000 water chemistry, bacteriological, and stream biomonitoring data records during the program history. Help us get to 100,000 Data Records by June 2021! Volunteers are encouraged to invite more folks to join the AWW Team and start monitoring!
We announced the dates for our brand-new Data Tools Webinar Series, which will feature basic, intermediate, and advanced video tutorials to help monitors and the public navigate through the AWW Water Data pages.
The data webinars will last about an hour and will be held on the following dates. We will post registration once the specific times have been decided. We hope you can join us!
August 5th (Beginner)
August 19th (Intermediate)
September 2nd (Advanced)
Thanks again for all of your hard work this year, and we are looking forward to another great year!