Bridging the Water Quality Data Gap
The Friends of the Shenandoah River is pleased to announce it is one of the hosts of 2015 Mid-Atlantic Volunteer Monitoring Conference on August 6-8 at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia.
A chance to share and learn form other monitors and programs, this conference will highlight citizen volunteer water monitoring efforts from Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. A variety of special events and breakout sessions have been planned as well. There is an early bird canoe trip scheduled on Thursday, and on Friday evening enjoy screenings at the first biennial Mid-Atlantic Volunteer Monitoring Film Festival.
The director of Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality, Mr. David Paylor; and Nickolas DiPasquale, Director of the Chesapeake Bay Program are the keynote speakers of the conference.
The importance of volunteer water quality monitoring groups has grown significantly in this day of incessant budget cuts, and the rise of pollution reduction programs. Representatives from state and local government will talk about how helpful our groups have been to them
We are excited that the Saturday program includes two tours of our own water quality laboratory at Shenandoah University named in honor or Fran Endicott . Our local partner, The Downstream Project, will be showing a couple of short videos and sharing the successes of the C Spout Run partnership in the habitat restoration of Clarke County’s Spout Run.
For people not familiar with karst geology and its impact on water quality (certainly not us from the Shenandoah Valley!), there will be a tour of one of our karst cave formations and a discussion of karst and it’s role in our regional history.
So please mark your calendars for those dates, August 6 – 8 and register by July 23 to ensure you have a space for the conference! Three local hotels are offering reduced rates. Details about reserving a room and other conference information is available on Facebook.