The Official Blog of Alabama Water Watch
We are excited to announce that our new Director of the Auburn University Water Resources Center (WRC) is Dr. Eve Brantley! We encourage folks to leave words of encouragement in the comments on this post 🙂 Read on to learn more about Dr. Brantley and why she will make a great director!
Congratulations to our 2019-2020 AWWard Winners! Thank you all for your dedication, enthusiasm, and incredible contributions to the AWW Program. You are an integral part of our team!
Continue reading “2020 AWW Volunteer Awards”
Its heating up and the summer months are upon us! As Alabamians go out and hit the beaches and rivers this summer for swimming, paddling, and fishing, it is important that water quality data is easily accessible and up-to-date. In addition to the Alabama Water Watch public data tools, an application called Swim Guide is another useful tool for determining if it is safe to swim.
Your data and observations can help let people know if it is safe to swim this summer! Learn how you can get involved by reading below.
Continue reading “How to: Establish a Beach Site in Swim Guide”
Join Weeks Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) as they celebrate World Environment Day this Friday, June 5, 2020 with the Alabama Backyard BioBlitz!
Continue reading “Join the Alabama Backyard BioBlitz!”Carl Woida has been a volunteer monitor with Alabama Water Watch for 19 years. When asked to share about his monitoring experience, he wrote a very thoughtful reflection about his time as a volunteer. We are excited to share his story. Read on to learn more about Carl, his monitoring, lessons learned, and why he enjoys being involved with the AWW Program!
My name is Carl Woida and I have been a Volunteer Monitor with AWW since 2001. I have two monitoring sites on the Paint Rock River, a major tributary of the Tennessee River. My monitoring group’s name is the Scott Branch Water Watch. Scott Branch is a small stream feeding the Paint Rock River. I am 75 years old and to date, since my initial certification in 2001, I have been recertified 10 times and have submitted 276 chemistry reports to AWW.
As the AWW Program Staff settles into the “new normal,” they are also adjusting to working with their new (four-legged) co-workers at home. Since they’ve worked with them about 5 weeks now, we thought we’d ask about their work habits:
It seems they have a slight tendency to sleep on the job…
Janne Debes started volunteering with AWW when she was certified as a Bacteriological Monitor in winter 2016. Since then, she has joined several monitoring groups, including Save Our Saugahatchee, Lake Watch of Lake Martin (where she serves on the board), and the USFS Tuskegee National Forest group. She has collected a total of over 320 Water Chemistry and 110 Bacteriological Monitoring data records. It’s easy to see why she has been named the Alabama Water Watch Monitor of the Year two years in a row!
Because Janne is so AWWesome, we thought you would enjoy learning a little more about her, or should we say you would like to Meet Our Wonderful Water Watcher.
Continue reading “Meet Our Water Watchers: Janne Debes!”Several monitors have asked if they should continue monitoring their sites amid the COVID-19 outbreak. As we know, anytime you participate in water-based activities there are risks for injury and sickness. AWW does its best to provide volunteers with guidance that will hopefully prevent such issues. In an effort to include the newest threats to health, we have reviewed the current information provided by the CDC related to Water Transmission and COVID-19.
We have wrapped up our final USFS CitSci Project Workshop for 2020!
AWW and the National Forests in Alabama held three water quality monitoring workshops in the Bankhead, Tuskegee , and Conecuh National Forests. We would like to thank everyone who attended these workshops, and especially all of the the project participants who have picked up sites to monitor!
