Director's Notes
November 2009
The Healthy Waters Project
StreamWatch is partnering with the Rivanna River Basin Commission and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) to collect data that will help identify biologically healthy subwatersheds. Many screening projects look for impairment with the idea of fixing sick streams. While this is necessary, the “Healthy Waters” approach is an exciting alternative that hopefully will help the community protect some of our best streams.
Another exciting aspect is the large amount of fish data that are being collected by VCU. There are not a great deal of data on Rivanna fish populations, so we might learn a lot!
StreamWatch is handling the bug data collection. You may have seen Rose around and about with the D-frame net used for this project. The field protocol is a bit different than our traditional kick-net method, but the basic idea is the same.
All in all, fish and bug data will be gathered at fifty-five sites in about 20 Rivanna basin subwatersheds. The size of each subwatershed, on average, is about one twentieth of the Rivanna basin, so this survey covers the entire Rivanna watershed (at least theoretically). Data collection will be finished by the end of the year, and Rivanna River Basin Commission will release the findings in mid-2010.
