Adopt-A-Stream Students in 7th Year
On
a humid August afternoon, four teams of students dressed in knee-high rubber
boots followed their instructors down a wooded path to an outdoor
classroom near a stream in the Peachtree City Nature Center.
These students joined the ranks of 155 other McIntosh High School students who have become certified over the past seven years through the Georgia Adopt-a-Stream Program.
The program consists of a series of workshops to prepare volunteers to
participate in Georgia's water quality
monitoring program.
The first workshop is based on the manual Getting To Know Your Watershed. Volunteers learn about the process of registering the stream, wetland or lake that they will monitor; how to use maps to delineate and assess their watershed; and how land use and impervious surfaces pertain to the watershed survey data forms. The second half of the workshop is spent at a stream conducting the visual stream survey and learning how to do a stream cross-section and calculate flow.
McInstosh science teacher Mike DeLisle, who leads the school's program, encourages the kids to stay in the program through all four years of high school and get their brothers and sisters involved. He said that data is more valuable when it can be documented over time.
"There are 260 active sites in the State of Georgia and 10 of those are monitored by students at McIntosh," DeLisle said. "No other high school in the state has accomplished seven years of monitoring."
Once the kids complete the first workshop, many take additional workshops in chemical and biological monitoring. That's when DeLisle calls in experts from other organizations like Environmental Institute of Georgia (EIOG) to assist.
EIOG
board member Dennis Chase offers his expertise as a retired biologist with the
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. "It's important that the kids learn the correct
way to take water samples," Chase says, "otherwise the data will be skewed."
Chase provides hands-on assistance to kids in the field and also coordinates
other activities to give them additional practice.
One of the criteria for certification with the Georgia Adopt-a-River program is that volunteers conduct at least one clean-up. That is usually done through Georgia's annual waterway cleanup called Rivers Alive.
The mission of Rivers Alive is to create awareness of and involvement in the preservation of Georgia's water resources. The program targets all waterways in the State including streams, rivers, lakes, beaches, and wetlands.
This year, EIOG is co-hosting five Rivers Alive cleanup in October and November on rivers and streams in Fayette County. For more information see sidebar and EIOG's River Alive Schedule.