Columbia Basin Water Quality Monitoring Project Website is complete and available to all Basin residents.
From 2007 to 2018 Columbia Basin Trust provided approximately $650,000 in funding for the project.
This unique project supported twelve community watershed groups to monitor their water.
All groups received Environment Canada training in the Canadian Aquatic Biomonitoring Network protocol, which is used across Canada by government agencies and consultants.
“The project data is available at cbwq.ca and includes water chemistry, velocity, flow, temperature, as well as interpretive reports created by water professionals and Environment Canada Analytical Reports”, said Laura Duncan, project coordinator.
Duncan continued, “Analytical reports are created by Environment Canada by comparing quality andquantity of benthic macro invertebrate communities in the local stream with populations in similar streamsin pristine condition. This is called reference condition. The amount the sample stream differs from the reference condition is a measure of water quality.”
Check out the project website at cbwq.ca to see who the partner groups are and what their data looks
like.
“Generally it is the large river systems that get all the monitoring attention”, said Jim Duncan, projectadministrator. “Data from small streams compliments the river data and is extremely valuable becausewater quality indicators show up much earlier in small streams. This is extremely important given pending impacts of climate change.”