5/2/18 12:22 PM
It’s here! Yes we’re talking about the weather, as it seems that we’ve finally shaken off winter with some halcyon spring days. But we’re also celebrating the release of CRWA’s The 2017 Charles River Annual Water Quality Report! Since 1995, CRWA's Volunteer Monthly Monitoring Program has used a corps of over 75 volunteer citizen scientists to collect water samples from 35 sites along the Charles and its tributaries once each month and deliver them to us. We deliver these samples to Massachusetts Water Resource Authority (MWRA) to test for various pollutants and then analyze the results that they send back. We post the E. coli results every month, and while this can provide a quick way to gauge the cleanliness of the river on those days, it is only part of the story. The annual water quality report details results from all the parameters we measure in addition to E. coli: Nitrogen, Phosphorous, chlorophyll-a, Enterococcus bacteria, temperature, depth, and macroinvertebrate biodiversity and abundance. Analyzing all of these parameters across the whole year provides a broader perspective and a more general picture of the Charles River ecosystem’s health.
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