WHAM!

Last November my Environment Action group heard a talk by Elizabeth Logue from the Ottawa Riverkeeper (she has left the post since then, to work on Indigenous issues). This lunch hour, other representatives of the Riverkeeper organization gave a public ZOOM presentation about community-based monitoring of the local environment, encouraging people to get involved with Watershed Health Assessment Monitoring (WHAM). 

Katy Alambo, one of the Ottawa Riverkeeper presenters

A major part of the Riverkeepers' work is to monitor the "Indicators" (of which there are 14) of the health of the water, with complex interactions between them. In no particular order, these are fish diversity, mercury in the water, dissolved oxygen, ice-on / ice-off (see below), flow, changes in land use, riparian connectivity, invasive species, water temperature, cholophyll-A, algal blooms, total phosphorus, sewer overflows and benthic invertibrates.

There are big gaps in the data collected so far. The scientists want more data to monitor trends and to fill in the gaps in their observations, and decisions made about water protection ought to be based on science, so this work is important. At only five locations in the extensive Ottawa River watershed, for example, is water temperature measured, and even then not always in the all-important summer months when it is at its warmest. Anyhow, even though we can't go back in time to add better historical observations, we citizens can help to fill the gaps in today's records.

Ottawa Riverkeeper has created its own data portals (such as this one) and their monitoring programs rely on contributions from the community. We can send in reports of the start and finish of freeze-thaw cycles in winter (Ice-On and Ice-Off Monitoring), of road salt and phosphorus contamination and of land use in the region.

Something we could do as a contribution is to take photos of any algal bloom that we notice in lakes and bays near Ottawa and send these pictures to Ottawa Riverkeeper or to Water Rangers (you may download this citizen science app to your phone). Be careful not to enter water with blue-green algae in it, because this can be very toxic, even at low concentrations, but its location needs reporting. Algae growth, linked to rising temperatures and the "nutrients" it gets from the water, is referred to as a "nuisance bloom" and it causes multiple threats to the ecosystem: it shades submerged species from the light they need; it depletes the oxygen in the water and kills the fish; it has an unpleasant smell. Tree pollen that settles on the water is not to be confused with algae, nor is common duckweed.

Another suggestion was to contribute to Invasive Species Monitoring. 

Invasive species in our part of Ontario / Quebec are Eurasian milfoil, rusty crayfish, zebra mussels, purple loosestrife, the round goby, phragmites (a kind of reed that grows five metres tall), Japanese knotweed, and, to my surprise, the yellow iris. I'm now feeling guilty about the fact that I grow purple loosestrife in my garden.

Yellow iris by the river near our house

Road salt monitoring will be resumed next winter, and its concentration in the water after a "trigger event" such as a snow- or rain-storm, or a sudden thaw, is assessed by means of a gadget that measures the conductivity of a water sample. >120 milligrams of salt per litre is harmful. Last winter the average reading in our area was 1062 milligrams per litre. Not good.