Volunteers test the waters of Blue Hill stream

BLUE HILL – A small group of volunteers learned how to take the pulse of their neighborhood streams Saturday as part of a regional watershed monitoring project.

The training session was sponsored by the Marine Environmental Research Institute in Blue Hill, which is completing its first season of sampling 15 fresh and marine water sites in the Blue Hill watershed.

The training session was one of several planned to increase community awareness of the monitoring project and to recruit potential volunteers to help with the sampling.

Mark Whiting, a biologist with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, provided trainees with a brief overview of the general physical features of a stream habitat before he introduced the rapid assessment method used to evaluate the health of a stream.

“This is a fairly new method. The [Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Department] developed it and we’ve adopted it,” Whiting said. “It’s definitely a quick assessment. You take a quick look at key indicators for good water quality and good fish habitat.”

The method involves a two-phased approach. The first phase involves looking at the “reach” or section of stream, with an eye out for physical signs of problems such as erosion or widespread siltation, which could be disrupting the fish habitat. Those features are then noted on a grid and scored to determine a stability index.

The second phase of the assessment had trainees taking samples of the insects living in the stream. Whiting demonstrated how to use a special net to collect samples of the critters living on, around and under the rocks in the stream, and then helped the trainees to identify what they found.

“Certain bugs are sensitive to types of pollution,” he said. “If you find them in a stream, it’s an indication of good water quality.”

For the assessment, the bugs are cataloged and scored, and the results are an indication of the water quality.

For this particular training session, the results of the two assessment tools matched.

“The bugs are telling us the same as the geomorphic survey did,” Whiting said. “We have a fairly stable stream with good water quality and a lot of food for fish.”

The training session took longer than anticipated, so the volunteers did not get a chance to move on to other streams in the area to conduct assessments.

But a crew from MERI and available volunteers plan to later survey Peters Brook and Carleton Brook.

The volunteers came Saturday for different reasons. Some, like Anita Wessel, took the training because of a general interest in the area’s streams.

“It’s something that interested me,” Wessel said. “There’s a brook running through my property. Beavers dammed it up and I always wondered why they chose that site.”

Others, like Kat Hudson, a science teacher at the nearby Blue Hill Consolidated School, hoped to link MERI’s research with the work she does with her classes.

“I’m already working with seventh and eighth graders in Mill Stream,” Hudson said. “This is a chance to work with a real research institute. It won’t just be an assignment for them. They’ll actually be involved in pure scientific research.”

The research is designed initially to develop a baseline assessment of the entire Blue Hill watershed, according to MERI Director Susan Shaw.

This first year has been the pilot year and the institute staff, along with some volunteers, have concentrated on sites, both freshwater and salt water, close to Blue Hill.

They plan to expand the survey to the wider watershed area, which includes the east side of the Blue Hill Peninsula as well as sections of the western side of Mount Desert Island, Shaw said.

The monitoring is critical, Shaw said, because the area is facing development pressures and there is a lack of baseline information about the area.

“Decisions are being made on a fairly ad hoc basis without baseline information on the watershed,” she said. “We’re building a body of information to determine how healthy the watershed is. It will be critical in keeping things healthy and maintaining that vitality over time.”

The effort is part of a wider move toward an ecosystem-based management effort that will consider all species in an area.

MERI will end its monitoring for the season this week but will begin again in April and survey sites throughout the summer.

According to Anna Bourakovsky, who heads the monitoring effort, MERI hopes to attract more volunteers and will offer additional training sessions in the spring.

Volunteers can help in testing of new sites next year and also can assist the effort by collecting water samples from streams after heavy rains.