Annual meeting will be held June 8 at Kreher Preserve and Nature Center
BY KADIE VICK
FOR THE OBSERVER
LEE COUNTY — As the summer heat intensifies, Alabamians enjoy the lakes, rivers and creeks to cool down and make memories. Alabama Water Watch (AWW) works to help protect the state’s waterways and ensure they are safe for community use.
AWW will host its annual meeting at Kreher Preserve and Nature Center on Saturday, June 8, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
AWW teaches community members how to monitor water health to help improve the longevity of Alabama’s water health for future decades. Training to join AWW is encouraged for everyone interested, as Alabama’s waters are important to the biodiverse environment, history and economy of the state, according to Sydney Zimmer, volunteer coordinator.
“Everyone likes to go swimming. We want to know if that water is safe or relatively safe to swim in, and our monitoring can help determine that. We really encourage people to come to our training to get scientific know-how,” Zimmer said. “So we give them the tools to go and collect the data, and then they can go further to communities and use that data, or data to action, as we call it, to make good actions or to have good actions make positive impacts, whether that’s through local policies and ordinances, identifying pollution sources, doing education outreach on their so kind of continuing what Water Watch does just through the volunteers.
“We teach people how to monitor for water quality in different aspects, like water chemistry, bacteria monitoring for E coli and stream biomonitoring, looking for critters,” Zimmer said. “We really encourage everybody to get into our training program. We have a hybrid program where folks go through an online course, and then they come to an in-person session where they learn the hands-on methods, and then they go on to pick their own sites to take samples, and then they submit that data to us into our statewide database.”
AWW is a project of Auburn University Extension and the Water Resources Center of the College of Agriculture, and its impact is statewide.
For those who have registered, the event will contain a catered lunch by Chicken Salad Chick, an awards ceremony, program updates and more.
To get involved and become a water monitor visit AWW’s website at alabamawaterwatch.org or reach out by phone at (334) 844-4785 or by emailing awwproj@auburn.edu.