Water trails have the extraordinary potential to make water, rivers and communities healthier. You can’t have a successful water trail without a healthy water body. You have planned for and built your water trail with conservation goals in mind but your work to protect your water trail does not stop there.

Monitoring plays a key role in water trail protection and stewardship. Monitoring is also a great way for people to get to know their water trails. Monitoring is observing or measuring selected features of a water trail in order to assess aquatic ecosystem health, assess the ability of the aquatic ecosystem to support human uses, detect early warning of changes, provide insight into the causes of problems, and tell you whether you have achieved your management and conservation goals.

A volunteer water quality monitoring program can help fill in important data gaps. They provide the basis for identification of problems needing immediate attention and for

long-term trend evaluation. Consider implementing a monitoring program for your water trail. In your community there may already be such programs on or near your water trail.

The Virginia Save Our Streams program, for example, offers introductory workshop on monitoring with certified monitors. They offer indoor workshops that allow new and experienced monitors to gain more practice with macroinvertebrate identification. They also offer outdoor workshops that provide training about field protocols and field identification.

Designing a monitoring program involves determining why you want to collect information, choosing indicators, methods, and sites, determining the time of year, day, and frequency of your monitoring, and assuring the quality of your results. For more information on monitoring contact a representative of your state volunteer monitoring program (your state water quality agency should be able to help find this person if such a program exists in your state).

Furthermore, the U.S. EPA offers these resources on monitoring:

• The Volunteer Monitor’s Guide to Quality  Assurance Project Plans  

• Volunteer Stream Monitoring: A Methods  Manual

• Volunteer Estuary Monitoring: A Methods Manual

• Volunteer Lake Monitoring: A Methods  Manual

• Volunteer Wetlands Monitoring: An  Introduction and Resource Guide

• Streamwalk Manual

Enforcement plays an equally important role in protecting your resource. If something is wrong or you suspect illegal activity along your water trail contact your state environmental department water managers or non-profit conservation organizations to get advice on how to enforce current laws and regulations.